


By the Hand of My Friend

by ConstanceComment



Series: Narrative Terms [3]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Mythology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, False Identity, Intrigue, Lack of Communication, M/M, Mad Science, Multi, Mythology References, Paranoia, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Quests, Separation Anxiety, Sleep Deprivation, Soul Bond, The Vast Bureaucracy, Trust Issues, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:32:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5050438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wasp bears a terrifying resemblance to the Order’s spark wasp, only sleeker, more refined.</p><p>Tarvek looks up at Gil, who is not looking at him, and his blood runs cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Sword of Wrnach

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a soundtrack: [and other jokes.](http://8tracks.com/constant-connie/and-other-jokes)
> 
> When necessary, each chapter will have its own warnings listed at the end notes of that chapter. If I miss something that you feel should've been warned for and wasn't warned for, please let me know so that I can fix that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Act One. The first task.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See the end notes for full content warnings.

The morning after Gil fixes Tarvek’s watch, a ship returns from the front carrying a bomb.

Or rather, the ship returns carrying a heavily wounded officer demanding to report to the baron with news, who also happens to be a bomb, something mad having been done to his insides that cause his organs to fail rather explosively.

Tarvek sees something horrifyingly like _relief_ come into Lieutenant Moran’s eyes just as his body starts to swell. Gil springs back immediately, and tackles Tarvek with a shouted “get down!”

If the crew follows the instruction, Tarvek misses it in the fall and the wet, muted _thump_ of Moran’s body being turned against him.

The room smells like blood, bile, waste. Someone screams, and Tarvek sits there, head ringing from the impact with the deck, Gil’s heavy weight crushing him. Tarvek can hear metal sizzling and pinging where the acid strikes it.

Gil stands, and throws off his smoking, gore-splattered coat, trying to keep the acid away from his skin. Tarvek never wanted to be thankful for Gil’s recent (or rather, not so recent) habit of emulating his father’s sense of dress, and yet here he is, desperately grateful that Gil’s long coat, messy hair, and high, disguising collar protected his skin from the blast. The only exposed pieces of him were his hands, and since Gil practically wrapped himself around Tarvek when he slammed him down onto the floor, they had been hidden behind Tarvek’s back.

Now, Gil exposes his forearms as he pins his sleeves back, already directing the clean up while Tarvek is still getting to his feet.

From what Tarvek can see, two people died in the blast, and on the ground by the wall is a third, an airwoman who’s having trouble breathing through the sucking hole in her chest. Tarvek doubts that she’ll live to see another sunrise, but he snaps at one of the Wulfenbach attendants running through the door, likely summoned by the sound of the explosion, to put her on a stretcher anyway. They are beyond lucky that Gil is used to treating his wounded intelligence officers himself, even if that is likely what the attackers had been planning on. Gil is sturdy; the invalided are, as a general rule, not. Tarvek shudders to think of this happening in a hospital.

Also counted among the dead is Moran. As the majority of the room scrambles to asses the wounded, Tarvek steps carefully over to his remains, and from a distance, inspects them. In the offal, he sees the steel-tough carapace of a slaver wasp, still in the early stages of dissolving; he must have only been wasped within the last two days. The wasp bears a terrifying resemblance to the Order’s spark wasp, only sleeker, more refined.

Tarvek looks up at Gil, who is not looking at him, and his blood runs cold.

* * *

The people of Sturmhalten were mostly indistinguishable from normal humans. They spoke, they loved, they still had access to all the higher functions of their brains, and they lived relatively average lives, except for the part where those average lives were shadowed by the creeping, literally unspeakable horror of never _really_ being your own person.

Considering the utmost stealth with which his father had infected the town, Tarvek had been reasonably sure that a fair number of the citizens couldn’t even see the chains that held them. Without the Other’s voice to compel them, they were free agents anyway. Tarvek used to think that was enough, to have most of you life be your own life. To at least be able to pretend you were free, even if you were one of the few who were in a position to know better.

Everything is relative. If Tarvek has learned any other maxim from his family than _survive_ , it is that. Cousins and uncles quietly taken away into side rooms and indoctrinated, some never to return when the odds proved unfavorable; Violetta at seven years old, polishing the knives her mother gave her for birthday; Tarvek’s sister with a scalpel; his father with the beacon; his sister with the hands of light that Tarvek gave her; Tarvek’s own hands in his sister’s back, turning the lights off, one by one. Morality is relative, truth is relative. It all depends on where you stand.

Tarvek used to think that being on the ground meant not being aware of how far you had to fall, meant not facing much of a drop at all. But it’s not the fall that one should fear; the landing is the part that kills you.

* * *

Tarvek’s heart beats a little too quickly as he leaves the room behind the wounded, slipping out of Gil’s shadow as the baron leads the charge to the infirmary. His hands are shaking, fine little tremors that Tarvek all too aware of. _Weakness_ , he thinks, and gets a hold on himself with a merciless grip, throttling his biological threat responses with careful breathing and mental discipline. Slowly, dropping further and further away from the baron and his train, Tarvek pulls himself back into line, forces his hands to still, the mental equivalent of smoothing out one’s tie, if ties were more like nooses.

It has, technically speaking, been over two years since Tarvek last panicked. It’s good to know he hasn’t lost the talent for it. The fear is still there, waiting for him. That’s fine; Tarvek is used to being afraid.

They used to have to train for this, as children, Tarvek and his family: what do you do in unknown, hostile circumstances? Think. Don’t let on that you’re shaken. Get your feet under you. Be armed. _Think_. Every lesson Tarvek has ever learned falls through him, making him cling tightly as they go.

What does Tarvek do when Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, who is already compromised from whatever it was his father did to him, may or may not be wasped? It’s not like Gil would be able to _tell_ Tarvek, if he _was_ infected. Gil could be entirely himself, or entirely himself and his father, right up until the moment Lucrezia told him ‘jump’ and Gil obligingly went out the window of the airship, or very quietly had Tarvek shot.

How would a slaver wasp, let alone a spark wasp, even interact with someone who was already dealing with another form of control? How would all of that interact with Gil’s choker? Given what Tarvek already knows about Lucrezia’s beacon, and about the wasps, serotonin imbalance comes to mind as a possible side effect. Unfounded aggression, mood swings, a severe difficulty holding onto one’s train of thought or falling asleep, the result of conflicting directives and chemical controls. But that Gil is exhibiting symptoms like those when he’s dealing with what Tarvek strongly suspects is years of sleep deficit is nothing conclusive; Tarvek deeply, suddenly, regrets that he’s allowed himself to get distracted from solving the problem of the Baron by something so tedious as helping Gil hold his fraying, illegitimate empire together.

 _Think_ , Tarvek swears at himself, dragging himself back on track. Speculating isn’t worth anything, he has to know because making assumptions is how people get killed. So, how does one even go about detecting someone who’s been wasped?

The only option he can think of is the wasp eaters, and, well, it’s Tarvek’s own fault that they’re scattered to the four winds along with the remains of the vespiary squads. Even if he had a clue where they were, contacting them, smuggling one of their charges onto the ship— that all takes _time_ , time that Tarvek _knows_ he doesn’t have.

Tarvek trusts his own ability to act, but Gil is good. Not as good as Tarvek is, but _good_. Paris trained him well, and being the Baron’s hidden son did the rest. He _knows_ Tarvek, which is worse. Gil will be able to tell if something is wrong with him, and while he’s been somewhat handicapped by his father’s shadow, Tarvek’s doesn’t give himself that long before Gil puts things together, or at the least gets suspicious. Tarvek refuses to underestimate either Gil or his father again, not when the wrong move now is going to get them all killed.

Of course, there’s another option. Because it always exists, because even if you don’t like it, will never take it, there’s always a way out. Tarvek could trust Gil, and trust himself. He could hope that two days and two and half years ago, when Tarvek said _drink this, it will keep you safe_ , that Gil did so, and Tarvek wasn’t made a liar for it. There are so many ‘ifs’ involved in that scenario. _If_ Gil trusted him, _if_ Gil was fast enough, _if_ the damn thing worked, untested and unrefined, entirely theoretical and _not nearly good enough to protect_ —

Tarvek can’t do this, not knowing.

Tarvek wishes Agatha were here. He misses her terribly, and her voice would solve the problem immediately; all she’d have to do was tell Gil to sit down, or to hop on one leg, and they’d _know_. Things would be terrible for the both of them for a little while if Tarvek’s right and Gil _is_ wasped, but at least he’d have his answer.

And it’s thinking of Agatha that the idea hits Tarvek like a lightning strike; Tarvek already knows where some of the wasp eaters are. They’re safe right where he left them. All Tarvek has to do is get back to Mechanicsburg.

It wouldn’t do, Tarvek thinks, a touch hysterically, for things to get _boring_.

* * *

One of the first steps to being a smoke knight is knowing that you will die. That’s the first lesson, what lurks under every single other one: death comes. You will die. Sooner than pretty much anyone else, if you walk in the way of the smoke. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to run towards death. In fact, it’s far more efficient _not_ to. Dying is unpleasant; Tarvek can now attest to that firsthand. It’s inconvenient, and it’s a waste, one that can and should be avoided or forestalled as long as reasonably possible. It’s that understanding that drives the Yellow Codex; you will die, but _not today_.

The Yellow Codex was Violetta’s favorite, when they were children learning the art. Tarvek had learned the four codices from teachers older than his baby cousin, but it had been her explanations of the Yellow Codex that had grounded him, when Tarvek first got back from Castle Wulfenbach.

“Chapter Sixteen,” Violetta would begin after combat practice, sounding the words out from a mouth swollen and bruised; “the arte of moving unseen, and with all due haste.”

She was six years old, then, and Tarvek was nine. Violetta already knew how to read and in the five languages she was already fluent in, but she needed practice at high level comprehension. She’d picked that chapter because it was almost like her age, and the Yellow Codex as opposed to the Red of the Blue, because Tarvek had asked her which one was her favorite.

“First,” she’d explained, pressing at a loose tooth with her tongue, “one must desire, above all things, to live. Shun death in your heart of hearts. Embrace life even when it grows most unbearable or grotesque—”

“Grotesque,” Tarvek corrected her. “Like there’s a ‘k’ in it.”

Violetta frowned, but continued. “—Even when it grows most unbearable or _grotesque_ ; you must want to live in your very soul. The will to survive must be in every breath of your body so that you may continue to take them. Death will come to you, young knight, but not today.”

It wasn’t for years that Tarvek was able to identify what was wrong with that scene, or the fact that they’d had so many moments like it. At the time, Tarvek had just been grateful for Violetta’s uncomplicated presence, back in the days before she learned to hate him, and the friendly voice that called his name, and read to him, because, she’d say, it was her job to make sure that Tarvek was not alone.

There was something novel about not being alone. From Tarvek’s perspective, he’s spent nearly a week surrounded by either Gil or Agatha, and the _Si Vales Valeo_ still echoes in the weakened chambers of his heart, humming in the space the two of them carved out inside him. After most of his adult life spent severed from him, and barely a week with that not even laid to rest, Tarvek hadn’t expected it to be so hard to go back to not trusting Gil anymore. He’d thought—

He’d thought, after so long living like that, this time it wouldn’t hurt.

* * *

The logisticians are the empire’s backbone. Anyone who underestimates them as being just cooks and accountants deserves to starve, or otherwise choke on their ignorance. If you want to know anything about your enemy, you know where and how he moves his troops and materiel. If anyone is going to know anything about anything, it’ll be them.

You can find a hive engine in someone’s troop movements, if they’re unintelligent about it. Considering that Tarvek’s family knew how to hide the signs, he doesn’t expect the Other to be obvious, either. If Gil is wasped, the Other is smart enough not to play her hand or expose him like that, by putting a hive on the ship. The Baron’s people established their holdings by clearing whole countrysides full of shamblers; they would sniff out a full engine in a heartbeat, and Lucrezia would be out one of her best placed pawns.

Thankfully, Tarvek’s not looking for a full engine. He’s looking for gossip. And no one gossips like the people who know best where the meat comes from.

Tarvek’s glad that the clothes Gil found him weren’t up to Tarvek’s usual sartorial standards. He doesn’t quite want to be recognized, right now, and there’s a decent chance that most of the airship city doesn’t even know that he’s been revived.

It’s one thing if one of the young baron’s new hires asks around, looking for someone to put pressure on; that’s just regrettable corruption oiling the wheels of the great bureaucracy. But if _Tarvek Sturmvoraus_ asks, well. When time stopped, he was a wanted fugitive from the empire’s justice. He’s not at all certain that that perspective on him is likely to have changed, no matter that Gil’s been keeping him close for the last three days or so.

So Tarvek puts on a nicer white shirt than the one he’d had in Mechanicsburg and rolls the sleeves up. He tucks sturdy brown working pants into high steel-toed boots, and secures his belt of tools to his suspenders. Then he steals a flat cap whose insignia marks him as a member of the empire’s Messenger Corps, 2nd Courier Division (‘The Postmen’), deliveryman third class, tucks his hair up into it, and moves along. It’s not the best disguise, but it’s what Tarvek is able to scrounge out of supply depot without being immediately caught. Hopefully it will be enough for some of Wulfenbach’s more literal movers and shakers.

The man Tarvek heads to is Victor Cumali, logistician lieutenant, a thin, dark-skinned man with ink all over his fingers. Tarvek arrives in his paper-strewn offices just after breakfast is being called in the nearby mess, and is quickly drafted to work.

“I can take your message while I work,” Cumali tells him, impatiently beckoning Tarvek over to one side of his desk. “Here, take this, you can help too. God knows there’s no good idle hand on this city.”

“It’s from the baron,” Tarvek replies, but picks up the page anyway. “But I hear you on the idleness; I’ve got a delivery to make to the Mechanicsburg facilities yesterday. There’s always something to do.”

The page is a requisition form for class b matériel that needs to be moved from the heart of the empire to the Alps. Tarvek helped plan that siege the requisition is preparing for just yesterday; it’s one thing to draw the lines, and another to see the blood flow. It’s something else entirely to see the wheels of war turning, and to know you helped set it all in motion.

“Is the baron alright, then?” Cumali asks. “I’d heard there was some kind of explosion.”

“It takes more than bombs to kill him,” Tarvek snorts. “There’s a hole in the chain, here. You won’t have enough to hold the peak through the spring if you don’t shore up.”

“Shit, good catch,” Cumali says. “I just wish they’d give up on suicide plots like that. Bombs just blow holes in my ship, and it’s not like it ever works for anyone.”

“Your ship?” Tarvek raises an eyebrow.

Cumali puffs out his chest defiantly. “My ship,” he says. “Well, our ship. The logisticians’ that is. We keep the city flying, and every other airship, landship, tunneler or boat in this whole empire.”

“I doubt the mechanics would agree with you,” Tarvek says dryly.

Cumali furrows his heavy brow, and marks the error Tarvek identified in red with more vehemence than is strictly warranted. “Well they can go suck their spanners,” Cumali declares. “Cogheads. Wouldn’t have a single rivet to drive if it weren’t for us.”

“Speaking of,” he continues, pointedly not looking at Tarvek, “someone's going to have to talk to them. Acid plays hell on the metalwork; that'll have to get patched, and they’ll need to requisition whatever it is they need.”

“And I'm assuming that person won’t be you?” Tarvek rolls his eyes.

Cumali grins, unashamed. “Not if I can help it. Talk to Rivka, the corporal in charge of the ninth engineworks; she’s almost tolerable. Hell, you’re so eager to get to the ground to make that delivery of yours; you get her to do the paperwork she owes me and I’ll arrange you easy transport there that won’t offend your ah, _princely sensibilities_.”

Tarvek startles slightly. “Excuse me?”

Cumali rolls his eyes at him. “You’re good,” he says, “almost bought it, until I placed your accent; not a whole lot of people _left_ , who sound like Sturmhalten. Plus, there isn’t a soul on this ship I don’t know about, coming or going. We’ve got to feed them all, you know? When the baron comes up from Mechanicsburg with a wounded VIP and tells the movers to be quiet about it, there aren’t a lot of options as to who it could be. And the Heterodyne Girl was in Paris last time anyone heard about her.”

“And they haven’t tried to put you in Intelligence yet?” Tarvek asks him, impressed despite himself. “Better yet, do you want to come work for me?”

Cumali laughs at him, teeth flashing in a narrow face. “I’m already doing you a favor, prince. Don’t push your luck. Besides, I like it here in Logistics too much,” he says. “No one expects me to do anything, so long as all the stuff ends up where it wants to be. What would I want to be a spy for? People shoot at you for breathing when you’re a spy. When you’re a logistician, they only shoot at you if you nag too much about paperwork.”

“I see now why you’d pass that part of the job on, then,” Tarvek says dryly. “If I get Ms. Harrison to do her paperwork for you, you’ll send me to Mechanicsburg?”

“I’ll do you one better,” Cumali says, still smiling he finishes the last signature on a form. “I figure there’s only one reason why you’d want a way down to the city, and that’s to get inside, package or not. So I’ll get you an in with Dr. Richards, one of the time borers. She’s been wanting a special dispensation from our branch for awhile now, and I wouldn’t mind expediting the process if you help me out on this.”

“Aren’t you even a little concerned about what I’m looking for?” Tarvek asks.

Cumali grins at him, not without a little malice. “Rivka owes me _a lot of paperwork_. I’ve been after her ass for _months_. There’s an office pool and everything. And besides,” he adds, “if you were no fly, I would’ve already been told about you.”

“Way I see it,” Cumali reasons, “the boss has you on a mission, and he told you to be quiet about it, which means going through the official channels, e.g. me. Hell, your _existence_ on this ship is probably supposed to be quiet. Either way, Baron Wulfenbach trusts you, and I trust my baron,” he shrugs, shuffling the papers against the desk to smooth out the stack. “It’s a matter of faith. Sometimes you just have to have a little.”

* * *

Lying is at the heart of every storyteller’s art. Serial novels, advertisements, opera, Heterodyne plays— they’re all lies at the core. And like all lies, all stories have power.

Oh, the amount of power in question varies from instance to instance of each, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s a little spark of _something_ in every one. The best hands at the work have mastered the art of transubstantiation: tell a story well enough, and by definition, you’ve made someone _believe_ , even if only for a second.

There’s a reason Tarvek has always loved the opera, why Sturmhalten’s theater was his favorite place both before and after Castle Wulfenbach’s library. Tarvek has never believed that cowardice is the worst of sins, not when paranoia keeps you alive and bravery often gets you killed. There’s power in being able to escape, and something human in wanting to do so. And Tarvek has always believed in, always wanted power.

* * *

The inside of the castle’s ninth engineworks is deafening. There are nearly nearly a hundred workshops like this spread out across the length and breadth of the great airship city, each one tending its own engine. They repair things here, too, and manufacture some of the larger fabricated items that the ship requires. A lot of things break on the castle, and none of the engineworks are ever still.

When Tarvek was a child, he used to think of the castle as a living thing, so different from the dark, infested catacombs of home. He had _loved_ the engineworks, the lively motion of it, the way that people yelled here and the noise didn’t _mean_ anything, nothing bad at least. Gil had told him once, on a night when neither of them could sleep, that he could hear the castle singing, sometimes. That the walls hummed, and if you listened the right way, you could feel it in the vibrations. It was, Gil had insisted, the reason why he never wore shoes.

They’ve both seen a truly living city, since, but looking around the heat and the noise, the rhythm of the machines, Tarvek can’t help but see the engineworks as one of the city’s many redundant, burning hearts.

“Did Victor send you here?” Rivka Harrison, mechanic corporal, shouts at him over the sound of hissing steam and clanking machinery, her voice pulling Tarvek from his thoughts. “If he did, you can tell him that he can shove his forms up his ass, if he can fit them in around the stick!”

“I can neither confirm nor deny who sent me, madam!” Tarvek shouts back. “Though I did bring paperwork!”

“ _Madam_ ,” Harrison shakes her graying head. “So polite. What an ass that man is!” Harrison yells suddenly. “Sending royalty to do his dirty work, all because he’s not brave enough to face me in my element!”

Considering that Harrison’s using her steam-powered fist to pound iron sheeting into shape while her gloved (presumably human) hand holds it flat, Tarvek can’t exactly blame Cumali for that.

“Ma’am?” Tarvek asks, fear twitching in his fingers. “I’m not—”

“Don’t lie to me son!” Harrison chides him loudly, her metal fist clanging loudly as she works. “I’ve been around too long not to know who’s important when I see ‘em! Besides,” she adds, at a more normal volume that forces Tarvek to step forward, “I remember _you_ , from back when I was still working in the third, even if I don’t remember your name. Though you _have_ gotten taller since I saw you last. Most of the children stayed out of the engines, back when this was a school, it being off limits and all that. But you, you kept coming back to number three, and hardly ever got caught.”

“I—” Tarvek swallows, feeling heavy with strain, nostalgia. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I don’t quite remember you, not nearly as well as you remember me.”

“That’s fine,” Harrison says. “Wouldn’t blame you— didn’t have the arm, before, and it tends to draw the eye. It’s just good to see you grown. Reassuring. Always had a soft spot for you little things. Better to see you here, working for the baron, then it is to see you end up like half the rest of them, embroiled in rebellion and other useless diversions.”

Loss aches in Tarvek like the old wound that it is. The engineworks are dark and bright all at once, the room lit mostly by the giant mouth of its engine. Tarvek knows that is not _his_ engine room, that there are dozens of furnaces just like this dotting the great airship city. But he can’t help burning himself with it, the rumbling heat of his past.

“That’s neither here nor there,” Harrison continues, interrupting his thoughts. “You certainly didn’t come here to listen to me ramble about the old days, either. And you’re not here just to do Victor’s dirtywork, are you?” She asks him.

“Ah,” Tarvek lies, “um, no, I’m not. I was— I missed this place,” Tarvek admits. “Though it really would make my life easier if you did the paperwork. I’m signed on as a courier, these days.”

“Really?” She asks, staring at him shrewdly.

Tarvek shrugs. “Better than rebellion,” he says, and the irony in it nearly makes him laugh with fear. Here he is, subverting the baron in his own city, courting civil war. The only difference between this and rebellion is that Gil holds no dominion over Tarvek, other than the threat of death.

Harrison squints at him. “Can’t disagree with that,” she says, and returns to hammering out the sheet metal with her steam-powered fist. “And it’s not that I’m complaining, mind. I just would’ve figured you for more ambition, is all.”

“I wanted to live,” Tarvek says baldly, and he can only hope that the honesty in the words isn’t as desperate, as bleak, as it feels.

The pitying look that Harrison gives him says he wasn’t as successful as he’d hoped. “Here,” she says. “I’ll do the paperwork for Victor, on one condition: Jacob Gunderson is rat bastard who cheats at cards and never pays his debts, but he’s one of the old Baron’s tame sparks, and he makes the _best_ steel in the empire. You pick me up say, a hectogram of his ten-gauge, and I’ll dot all my ‘i’s and cross all my ‘t’s just the way Victor wants me to. We have a deal, your highness?”

“Ah, please, don’t,” Tarvek cautions her, affecting a wince. “I’m a courier, now; I’d prefer to not have the title. So, you can call me Bedwyr. Bedwyr Bedrydant, deliveryman third class,” he introduces himself. “At your service.”

“Pleasure,” Harrison assures him, and Tarvek shakes the hand she holds out for him, feeling the give of flesh under the sturdy leather of her glove.

* * *

Tarvek doesn’t trust the truth nearly as much as he does a good lie. A lie he understands. A lie has many purposes. A truth is only ever what it is. Inflexible. Unchanging. It’s why there’s power in a name; once you name something, you bind it, give it form and function. Even if the name is false, it describes, in some way, a real thing. So, yes, there’s a power in truth, but it’s no good for his purposes; the truth can only destroy.

A promise, though. Tarvek had always thought that they were lies of a different sort. A story that people told each other when they wanted things.

Tarvek can still feel the rain in Mechanicsburg, drying on his skin. Can feel Agatha’s hands on his shoulderblades, her hair on the back of his neck, the sense of her presence in his chest like a song. The sense of _Gil_ , far away, twisted and _sick feeling_ pressing out from Tarvek’s heart.

 _‘We_ won’t _let them,’_ she’d said. The words ring in his head, full of Agatha’s trust. Tarvek wishes he could share it, that he could believe his plan _worked_ , that Gil has been running circles around the Other for years, now. But Tarvek can’t. Not in a world this uncertain.

The best he has is Agatha’s promise, and the truth that’s burning like a single coal behind his breastbone, terrifying in its power and the comforting illusions it has already laid to waste: the three of them are _better_ , when they’re together. The leverage, the firm place, and the energy to tilt the world.

* * *

The hydroponics bays are a marvel, the closest thing to parks that the city has. There are a few scattered throughout the ship at tactical positions rather than aesthetically pleasing locations, and they supplement the supplies that the city takes in from the ground.

The one that Tarvek heads to is located at the top of the ship, covered by a wide dome of tempered glass that lets in the afternoon sun. Tall trees and low bushes sit in ordered rows, all bearing fruits and berries long out of season. Like the rest of the ship, the walkways between them are metal, but nothing here feels _sterile_. It’s alive in a different way from the rest of the city, alive and good the way the surface of the earth is as opposed to the bowels of the world, full of clean, real air even this far above the clouds.

Tarvek can feel the light on his face, and the skin of his forearms, sinking into him in a way he hadn’t realized he’d been missing after two days spent primarily in the ship’s interior, and his whole morning on his feet.

Things have gotten out of hand. After leaving the ninth engineworks, Tarvek has traveled what feels like miles, and all by foot. And with every step, Mechanicsburg has only felt farther and farther away. Gunderson, one of the old Baron’s tame sparks, wanted his gambling debts erased in return for the steel. Gunderson’s bookie wants his jacket re-dyed. The seamstress Tarvek went to in order to dye the jacket turned out to be running low on dye, and refused to spend any of it for the bookie’s sake, unless Tarvek found her new quality ink for a different project of hers. And of course, in return for their excess dye, the cartographer private Tarvek spoke to wants a bottle of Châteu Dispositif for his troubles. Which would be less of an issue if that particular winery hadn’t burned down four years ago.

Luckily enough for Tarvek (and by extension, lucky for the cartographer) one of the ship’s botanists, another tame spark, is quite the wine enthusiast. The cartographer Tarvek is running this particular favor for mentioned her by name as one of the few people in the city who still own a bottle of Dispositif; of course, the cartographer already _asked_ her, and and was rebuffed, leaving Tarvek to try his hand at negotiation.

Instead, he’s trying his hand at contact gardening _again_ , for the second time in a week.

“Wouldn’t have figured a courier for this sort of thing,” Dr. Martha Browning comments, as Tarvek helps her hold down a vine of mobile riesling.

“Oh, you know us postmen,” Tarvek says, giddy mania leaking into his tone, “ _‘neither snow nor rain,’_ and all that. If wrangling a plant is what it takes to reach my package, then I’ll do it.”

“Still,” Browning remarks, pruning shears making deft work of the plant’s extraneous growth, “there’s dedication and then there’s helping me with my hobbies.”

“Well, yes,” Tarvek agrees, “but if helping you with your ah, ‘hobbies,’ as you put it, helps me get to my destination _faster_ —”

“Mm,” Browning hums, clipping her shears back to her belt. “What did you need, anyway?”

Tarvek wipes his hands on his work pants, wincing internally at the mess. “A bottle of Châteu Dispositif. Word on the ship is you’re one of the few who still have one.”

“Oho!” Browning grins, shoving the vine carefully back into its trellis. “That’s certainly a pricy favor you’re looking for. I’ve been saving that, you know. For when the war’s over.”

“That’ll be awhile still, I think,” Tarvek says. “The bottle won’t even keep that long.”

Browning snorts. “That pessimism is crushing. You’re what, twenty, and you’re already this jaded about things? You don’t even remember the Long War, kid.”

“This _is_ the Long War,” Tarvek insists. “The old Baron kept it quiet for a few years, but this is the _same fight_. It could be _decades_ again before things are over. It’s a chardonnay, and it’s already four years old, now; it’s going to age into being undrinkable within the next three years.”

“Pessimistic of you,” Browning frowns at him.

“ _Realistic_ of me,” Tarvek corrects her. “Look, it’s— you get a _view_ , delivering packages. Not a _good_ one all the time, but a view. And it’s not pleasant, on the ground or in the air. It’s going to be awhile yet before things are over.”

Dr. Browning gives him a shrewd look, crossing her arms over her chest. “You still believe it’s going to end, though. And if you’re right, I might as well drink the wine now, a prize to myself for having survived this long.”

There’s an uncomfortable truth in that, and it catches Tarvek somewhat flat footed. “Well,” he starts, but he’s not really sure where to go from there. “I could pay you for it?” He hazards.

Browning scoffs. “On a third class salary?”

“I’ve got something of a nest egg saved up,” Tarvek insists.

“I sincerely doubt that, Mr. Bedrydant,” Browning says. “But if you’re adamant on it, I’ll cut you a deal: I need a new toolset, and some good potting soil. You help me re-outfit this hydroponics bay, and I’ll give you the bottle, free of other charge.”

Tarvek blinks. “That’s—” he frowns, working the cost in his head. “That’s a _lot_ ,” he tells her, and can’t help the plaintive note that creeps into his voice.

Browning grins at him. “I was really looking forward to this chardonnay,” she returns. “Let it never be said I don’t take pity on the desperate.”

“That’s extortion is what it is!” Tarvek exclaims.

Browning’s grin gets wider, and she shrugs. “We all take our pleasures where we can find them.”

Internally, Tarvek seethes. He knows when he’s being played, damn it, and he doesn’t appreciate some two-bit _botanist_ trying to waste his time and effort. Favors are all well and good, but at times like these, he understands the appeal of negotiation through force.

“Here,” Browning tells him, holding out a canteen from her toolbelt, “drink this before you go. You’re not looking so good.”

“What is it?” He asks, eyeing the canteen warily.

“Distilled water,” Browning assures him. “This strain has been known to cause contact inebriation; I’d rather be safe than sorry, so you’ll need to stay hydrated.”

“You’re joking,” Tarvek says flatly.

Browning shakes her head. “Nope. It’s a pet project of mine, trying to grow a vine where the grapes ferment as they grow; skip the long incubation period, and all that, not to mention the fortune to be saved on the barreling process. Problem is, it’s a bit potent right now, though I’ll get it eventually. You eat anything recently?”

Tarvek frowns, and drinks some of the water, it’s tasteless and lukewarm, and it makes him uncomfortably aware that the last time he had anything to drink was this morning. “Not as such, no,” he admits. “I skipped lunch; to come here, actually.”

“Not good,” Browning remarks, sighing a little. “Here, I’ll get you a sandwich. Least I can do since you helped me pare down the riesling.”

Tarvek pinches the bridge of his nose, shoving his glass up a little farther up. Now that he thinks about it, he can recognize a looseness in his reflexes that has no place being there. “I should’ve expected this,” he comments. “The last time I had to deal with plants, I got drugged that time, too,” a scowl breaks out over his face. “And it was _his fault_ last time, too!”

“Whose fault?” Browning asks, idle curiosity tossed over her shoulder with the question as she dips into her toolbox for what appears to be a sacked lunch.

“A libertine I have the misfortune of being acquainted with,” Tarvek grumbles, waving her off, irritated that his hand _flops_ more than is strictly necessary as he makes the gesture. “Always making questionable decisions and being too sneaky and _self-sacrificing_ to actually _listen_ to anyone. As if doing something is only worthwhile if you do it alone.”

“Sounds like a peach,” Browning says dryly, handing him the sandwich. It is, unfortunately, quite damp. Tarvek supposes that this is what happens when one keeps their sandwich in a sack in a greenhouse.

“I’m stuck with him,” Tarvek says by way of agreement. “I’m on this run for him, anyway.”

“Owe him a favor, do you?” Browning asks idly.

“Something like that,” Tarvek hedges.

Tarvek eats the sandwich on a bench, the afternoon sun still warm on his skin, even through the tempered glass. Anxiety crackles in his veins still, and he breathes through it, the clean, green-smelling air pulling him back to earth. Around him, he can hear the sound of birds, likely sparrows or other confused wildlife that make it onto the city by way of the smaller fleet ships’ avian stowaways. Tarvek closes his eyes, regrets the dampness of the cheese and the limpness of the ham in the sandwich, and listens to the birdsong and the bay’s automatic sprinklers, the sound of distant rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for chapter 1: Gore - a dude explodes in the first scene, and other people get pretty seriously hurt as well; Child abuse - specifically neglect, exposure to violence, and emotional abuse; Tarvek also has a panic attack.
> 
> In other news, quests! And a lot of Wulfenbach extras. I have a lot of feelings about The Haus That Klaus Built. So apparently the answer is to have _all the OCs_ so I can talk about my bureaucracy feelings.


	2. Mabon the Huntsman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second task.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See the end notes for content warnings.

Arthur’s first and most loyal knights were Cai and Bedwyr, and the stories barely remember them. All that’s left are their names, some deeds, and little tidbits of their how they were known; Cai for his ill temper, and Bedwyr for his place by Arthur’s deathbed. After all, no one wants to tell the story of Arthur’s construct seneschal, or the spark who could only save himself. The epics were always far more concerned with Arthur himself, or Lancelot and Guinevere; it’s the doomed romances that really sell, like the fall of Merlin to Nimue, or the loss of Camelot for love.

Walking the halls of the great city, the empire is the thinned replica of itself after the Baron’s passing into stasis. Klaus Wulfenbach’s Pax Transylvania is a long-gone golden age to the people on board, something remembered with fondness and nostalgia by the castle’s residents. To Tarvek, it was _three days ago_. What will the operas have to say about _him_ , when he dies? Will they remember that Tarvek was a knight himself, or that he was a child once, in this city?

Meanwhile, in the living day, stories about Gil are already thick on the ground. A little prodding and the people of the airship city won’t _stop_ talking about their young baron.

Jan Suchý, communicator corporal, is a sturdy man with a heavy brow and light hands, one ear tuned to his apparatus and the other missing entirely. He boasts also posture that suggests that if Tarvek wanted to remove him from his seat in the sixth luxograph office, he’d need a crowbar of some sort.

Unlike the officer in charge, the luxograph office is itself a delicate contraption, mostly glass and wire, telegraph equipment melding into a largely stationary heliolux array with the same eye towards brutal practicality that is so characteristic of everything else on the airship. Suchý sits in the center of it all as his staff leaves their shift along with the day’s last light, the sun painting the whole room amber-gold as it sinks beyond the mountains.

“The baron’s gone mad,” Suchý explains, not looking at Tarvek as he transcribes a message from one machine to another. “Has _been_ mad, for years and years, ever since he first turned up in Beetleburg, threw a bomb at the head of the university and terrorized some poor young woman, not to mention the staff.”

For a brief moment, Tarvek can almost see it: Gil, raving, unshaven, the same as Tarvek had gotten used to seeing him in Paris; Agatha, terrified by him, the two of them a perfect mirror of Ogglespoon and Euphrosynia. But the image shatters in an instant; loathe as he is to admit it, Tarvek has been blinded by his negative expectations before in regards to Gil, and Tarvek hasn’t known Agatha to cower since he met her.

“The last time I was on the ship was during the siege; has it really gotten that bad?” Tarvek asks.

“It’s bad,” Suchý confirms. “I mean, it wasn’t _bad_ bad until these last few years. Used to be manageable, then, when his father was at the helm. The new one’s still a _boy_. He’s not strong enough; we lost most of the empire in the collapse, and he’s infernally _slow_ at taking it back.”

“If he were like his father,” Suchý comments, clicking out a message with a deft hand, “we wouldn’t even be in this mess to begin with.”

If he weren’t already fighting manic, horrified laughter at that statement, Tarvek would likely start screaming. Or hit someone, the details aren’t quite clear. But, because he is a professional, Tarvek does neither of these things.

“You’re still here, though,” he points out instead.

“And go where?” Suchý snorts. “I was here when they were still building this airship— this is my _home_ ,” he says, and with his free hand, he gestures to the setup in front of him, and by extension, the whole office. Encompassed too, are the mountains below, and beyond that, all the empire’s land.

“I was living in Teplice, when Professor Kohout decided that he was tired of being an educator and wanted to be a dictator instead,” Suchý says, turning off his station for the evening. “He turned half the town invertebrate before the Baron rode in with the jägers and the Third Mechanicavalry.”

“Someone like that, you don’t turn away from,” Suchý tells Tarvek, leading him out of the office as the sun sets behind them, the corporal locking the door on the last of the light. “His son’s a mess,” Suchý says, “but he’s working to get his father back, and that’s all I care about. The Baron will be back someday, and I intend to be here when he gets here.”

* * *

Tarvek used to have nightmares about falling. Stupid, but he did, before he had worse things to be afraid of.

In the dream he used to have, the Baron didn’t send him home from Castle Wulfenbach, he used the force of his presence to push Tarvek to the edge of a hangar door, until he was hanging on to the floor to stay alive, most of his body in the air. And Gil—

When Tarvek was first sent home, there was a period of an entire three days when he convinced himself that Gil would come to rescue him. That there had been a plan. That he’d receive a coded letter, or something, like the games of smoke knights he had been playing all his life, but real, now, and better. Tarvek had convinced himself, out of a desperate, child’s need to to hope, that Gil could have only betrayed him with a plan in mind, because Gil was clever, like that, to double-cross Baron Wulfenbach and live to bring Tarvek in on it, even if there had been _some reason_ why he couldn’t start the plan that way.

In his nightmares, the Baron asked Tarvek if he’d been spying for his family, and when Tarvek lied, the Baron asked Gil if that was true. And Gil leaned down for Tarvek, holding his hands out.

In the logic of dreams, Tarvek knew he could only hold on to one thing at a time, nevermind that he had two hands. Gil’s hand, or the ledge. In his nightmares, as a child, Tarvek let go and reached for him. And Gil let him fall.

Tarvek never hit the ground, like that. He just fell, and fell, and watched the only good place he’d ever known get farther and farther away, his fingers aching from where he’d held on, tingling from where they’d brushed the skin of Gil’s wrists just before the air took him.

Neither the dream nor the nightmare lasted long. Gil never came for him, and Tarvek remembered very quickly that he had better things to be afraid of.

* * *

“The baron?” Preecha Metharom, mechanic third class, asks, words muffled by the screwdriver he has shoved in his mouth. “He’s alright, I guess. A little off. It’s horrible, the way people talk about him. I think it’s made him self-conscious, or something.”

“The baron?” Tarvek repeats, incredulous. “Self-conscious? With an empire under his command?”

Preecha shrugs thin shoulders. He’s small— Tarvek hesitates to guess his age at anything higher than sixteen. But considering the boy’s profession and the fact that he’s currently talking to Tarvek while halfway embedded in ceiling, his size is likely something Preecha considers and advantage. Considering that Tarvek’s the one holding his legs while he works, Tarvek supposes that the boy’s slight frame is an advantage for him, as well.

“I dunno,” Preecha hazards, pulling the screwdriver out so he can poke the wiring behind the light fixture he’s repairing. “Not as big an empire as it used to be, back when I was a kid.”

“You’re _still_ a kid,” Tarvek says dryly.

“I’ve got a salary, we’re the same rank, shut up,” Preecha rattles off, as if the protest is something he’d taught himself by rote, which, Tarvek reasons, is very likely considering how often he must have to say it. “But like I was _saying_ ,” Preecha stresses, exasperated in the way that comes naturally to offended teenagers, “everyone keeps comparing the baron to his dad. I _hate_ it when people say I’m like my dads, or not enough like them— and they’re just regular sparks. The baron’s dad was, well, he was _the Baron_. Can’t imagine it’s any fun for him either.”

“I didn’t quite like comparisons to my father, either,” Tarvek says, and the truth in that is uglier than he intended; Lucrezia in Agatha’s body, using her daughter’s voice to mistake Tarvek for the late ‘faithful Wilhelm.’

“Right? But like, the baron handles it weird. Everyone says—” Preecha cuts himself off, as if embarrassed. Or as if he’s put the screwdriver back between his teeth, which can’t _possibly_ be sanitary.

“Everyone says what?” Tarvek asks dryly. “He’s got a third eye? He’s Ogglespoon come to life again, here to win the princess at last?”

“Heh, no,” Preecha laughs. “I wish it was something weird like that. Something _fake_ weird, like he was born on the Moon and it’s calling him home. Instead, word is he acts like his dad used to,” Preecha tells Tarvek. “Like— like he was so tired of people saying he needed to be like the Baron, that he decided to _channel_ him, or something, like the circus people who say they can talk to ghosts.”

Tarvek is too young for heartburn, the sick, congested ache of it. Something must’ve been in that sandwich that Dr. Browning gave him hours ago. There’s no reason for his chest to hurt like this.

“Can you let me down now?” Preecha asks, screwing the plating around the light fixture back into place. “I’ll get that paper from my dad for you, if you promise to swap me for a new bungee cord.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a stepladder?” Tarvek asks dryly, and gets slapped on the top of his head for his trouble, the impact muffled by his cap.

“You’re the _worst_ ,” Preecha mutters as Tarvek carefully lowers the boy to the ground.

“I’m the worst person who’s bringing you a new bungee!” Tarvek protests as Preecha bolts off to his next task.

“Salaried mechanic!” Preecha yelps as he darts around the corner. “Same rank! The worst!”

Arguing with children and changing lightbulbs; Tarvek can _feel_ himself losing his grasp on his own dignity by the minute.

* * *

In the stories, Arthur’s knights were just as unreal as the Heterodyne Boys, and it was one of the reasons why Tarvek loved them. Yvain traveled with a lion bound to his soul. Marrock was a wolf by night. Balin wielded the Lance of Longinus, and once leveled a country with its strength. Gawain was powered by the sun. Galahad drew his great speed and strength from his sexual and moral purity. Lancelot, berserker, betrayer, Knight of the Lake, was raised in Avalon and knew the faerie’s ways. One-handed Bedwyr, who could throw a spear with perfect aim, was an open spark in times when such things still routinely brought down public burnings, and though the people called for his head, Arthur protected him every time. Cai, Arthur’s construct seneschal, could go nine days without sleep or rest, walk through water or fire, could grow to a giant’s size, and though he was always cold, Cai could send fire from his hands, making wounds that never healed.

It was Cai’s power that inspired Tarvek to give Anevka her best defense. In the myths, before Cai was Arthur’s seneschal, he was his human foster brother, son of the king whose lands would someday become Arthur’s. He was acidic, and rude, but he loved Arthur, even if he did call him Wart instead of his name most days.

Tarvek had wanted to believe in that, when Anevka was dying. Even though he knew it was stupid, he’d wanted to believe, wanted to give some kind of _meaning_ to the fact that his heart was breaking for a sister who he didn’t know for sure had ever loved him. Maybe she had, in her own way. Even though Tarvek knew it was more likely that there was no real affection, she’d been— not _kind_ to him, because Anevka was never kind. But she’d been fond of him, charming, and witty, and it didn’t matter, then, if she’d never protected him because there was no _safe_ in their house or in their bloodline, and Tarvek had never protected her, either. There was just living, and doing what you could to _keep_ living.

It took his sister six days to die. Tarvek did everything he could, went deeper into his spark than he’d gone since he broke through. He stole a _Muse_ for her. But he’d never— Tarvek wasn’t a _medical_ doctor. He was, when you got down to it, an engineer. He knew _machines_ , like clanks and systems of government, always on the scale of synthesis, how all the parts moved together. But he couldn’t— Anevka was the sibling whose spark tended towards the biological, not him. Even then she mostly took apart where Tarvek preferred to build. And all Anevka could do was lie there and gibber madly from the pain and _die_ , right there in his his hands.

On the fifth day after he failed to murder Anevka, their father came down to Tarvek’s laboratory, to see his children and the Muse.

Tarvek was unshaven, unkempt, the room and everything in it stained with his sister’s gore as he tried (in vain) his sister’s method of taking things apart, to see how they could be fixed. Tinka was beautiful and glorious and helpful, full of a grief and a wonder that mirrored Tarvek’s own, horrified that they would (temporarily, Tarvek swore) lose their sisters but find each other instead. And Anevka, of course, was by that point a ruined frame, nearly more machine than human as Tarvek had decided it was better to build her a new body entirely than try to fix the one that she was in.

The prince had been distraught, in his own way. Grieving, insensate, uncontrolled as it finally became true to him that his daughter was dying, as if he hadn’t done it himself in the mad drive to put his _dead lover_ inside her head.

Tarvek hadn’t slept in five days, and looked the part. His father just looked like he always did, past the veneer: barely a step from being unravelled.

Tarvek didn’t _need_ his sister to live again; Anevka wasn’t integral to his plans. But he’d wanted her there with him all the same, the part of him that still cared about _unfairness_ railing against what had been to her in his absence, just the same as raged at the unthinking, _ignorant_ destruction that plagued the Muses and Tarvek’s father continued to perpetrate. Someday, Tarvek was going to have found the rest of the Muses and been king, and he and his sister would’ve been _free_. They would’ve had the chance to know each other in a world without bars on it, and Tarvek had wanted _that_ , the _possibility_ of what they deserved more than anything else.

With Merlin’s help, Arthur had raised his brother from the dead, only days after Arthur had given Cai the sword he’d pulled from the stone as a weapon for the battle that would kill both Cai and his father. As payment for his favor, Merlin commanded Arthur to tell him how his brother had come by that particular blade, and told Arthur to take up his birth father’s crown. In return, Cai became Arthur’s first knight and his seneschal, because who better to guard the king than his brother?

* * *

Castle Wulfenbach is a city, and like any other it has neighborhoods. The school occupies one of the larger ones, largely in the center of the ship, though it did branch out to the starboard side by the stern in order to provide the children access to areas with windows. Or at least, it _did_ , before the empire collapsed and Europa’s best primary education institution became another casualty of the Long War. Now, the dormitories that were once filled with children are filled by soldiers instead, the rooms with their single beds parcelled out to various officers, the privacy a gift for unwavering service.

However, unlike most cities (and more like most castles), the great airship is tended by its own internal housekeeping staff. And, like most housekeeping operations, the airship’s has its iron-fisted leader.

Dénes Bátori, logistician captain, is not that man. He is, instead, the second in command to that man, sharply dressed and _violently_ Hungarian. He’s also one of the few people on the ship who can sign for a bulk delivery of silk, which means Tarvek is currently up to his elbows in laundry, ironing sheet after sheet as Bátori complains.

For the last half hour, the topic has been tensile strength in brands of linen. Tarvek never expected to have sympathy for Violetta’s hate, but here he is nonetheless, nodding along and pretending to care about whatever Bátori chooses to speak about.

One of Tarvek’s more notable adventures with Gil had been an investigation of the castle’s laundry chutes. Between now and then, the only thing that appears to have changed in the laundry room connected to the school district is the quality of the machines, and the staff. Now that the night shift is well underway, the room is nearly deserted.

“— not much of an improvement on his father, that way,” Tarvek hears, and decides to tune back in.

“What was that?” He asks. “I’m sorry, I missed it over the sound of the machinery.”

“The baron doesn’t sleep,” Bátori, says flatly.

“I don’t much anymore, myself,” Tarvek says, half joking even as he privately agrees with the venom in Bátori’s tone. “Too much to get done, and not enough time to do it in.”

“A little overwork is nothing to be ashamed of, if unhealthy,” Bátori allows. “But three months spent awake!” He hisses. “I’m responsible for the defense and outfitting of the living quarters of everyone in this sector, but _he_ is the only one that I never see use theirs!”

To be fair, most sparks tend to sleep in their labs. And Gil _has_ been specifically avoiding his own quarters; Tarvek got him to _sleep in an airshaft_ yesterday, and even then only for a few hours.

“He doesn’t eat, either,” Bátori adds, folding a sheet with military sharpness. “He spent two and a half years being looked after by a watchdog clank like it was his _nursemaid_ , until something happened to it, and I’d bet half my salary for this month that that _something_ was that pirate he and his father _both_ kept around like a rabid dog on a leash.”

Bizarrely, Tarvek almost feels less afraid of DuPree now that she’s threatened him properly. At least now he knows where they stand. Out of all the people in his life who’ve wanted Tarvek dead, DuPree is the most refreshingly open.

But added together, the rest of Bátori’s assessment of Gil’s recent health is both alarming and frustrating. Tarvek knew that Gil had an enormous capacity for endurance, had borrowed it himself for awhile when they were chained together at the soul. But this—

“I heard it was getting better, lately,” Tarvek tries. “I mean, you hear stuff on the road, but—”

“You sweet, innocent laborer,” Bátori shakes his head at Tarvek. “The baron is _unstable_ ,” Bátori spits, fluffing a pillow with more viciousness than is strictly required, snatching the cover Tarvek holds out for him with the same precise vehemence that seems to drive his every action. “I keep thinking, _Dénes, why not go to Paris, become the master of your own house?’ ‘Because, Dénes,’_ I keep telling myself, _‘Paris is full of Parisians, and all the buildings are ugly!’_ If it weren’t for the benefits here, and the people there, I’d have fled the country years ago.”

“But _you_ ,” Bátori continues, wheeling on Tarvek with a manic glint in his eye, “you have a _chance_! You’re unburdened by concerns such as good taste, or fashion! You could escape to Paris, and enjoy yourself as much as one is able to in such an abominable city.”

“Excuse you, I happen to have _excellent_ taste,” Tarvek says, entirely and distractingly affronted.

“Your uniform needs to be tailored and you’re wearing your hair up in a hat to hide the damage,” Bátori says succinctly, his nose turned up to sniff. “Your sleeves are rolled instead of cuffed, and you look like you’ve been in an engineblock. Obviously you don’t care about your appearance; Paris would fit you fine.”

Rage sweeps through Tarvek, with more force than he would’ve had expected. It’s not like he’s never been insulted before; it’s not even like this is the first time he’s been insulted in the last _hour_. And yet. The heft to the iron in his hands is suddenly attractive.

They’re in a public space, Tarvek reminds himself under the edged haze of his spark. If he kills anyone here, he’ll have to deal with the witnesses. Then the bodies will have to be disposed of, as well as anyone who could see him disposing of the bodies. _If he kills anyone here_ , this will quickly devolve into _a bad plan_ , and Tarvek’s plans are always _elegant and finely crafted things of beauty._

“I happen to _like_ Paris,” Tarvek grinds out.

“You would,” Bátori shakes his head. “You poor, deprived soul.”

With great care, Tarvek puts the iron down on the board, standing on its back end so as not to burn the sheet, and wipes the steam off his glasses. “About that silk,” he says.

“Of course,” Bátori replies. “My apologies for getting distracted. If you get the parts for my broken washing machines, and fix them, I’ll sign off on whatever you need. It’s a scandal to have to do this all this work by hand.”

That sentiment, at least, Tarvek can agree with.

* * *

When Tarvek woke after dying, it was like someone had put a light inside him. He felt _stronger_ in some way he couldn’t quantify; sharper, faster. He’d thought, at first, that it was just post-revification rush. After being so sick for so long, it made sense that a return to normal would feel like that, whole and good and _better_ , just as a side effect of having run all his blood through a filter, illness purged from him by lightning.

When Agatha and Gil were _sharper, faster_ too, Tarvek had written their symptoms off as the same. He ignored the way something inside him _sang_ to be close to them, that stood up and took notice of their presence even beyond the awareness that smoke knight training had beaten into him. Of course he breathed easier when they were close; that way he could keep an eye on them, for very different reasons each.

But when Gil’s father reached into his head and _put something there_ , Tarvek felt it like a door slamming shut somewhere else in a small house, the vibration and the sound travelling through the walls and the floor. It _hurt_ in a way that he hadn’t even had the words to describe beyond _loss_ and _alone_ and _not again, no, please._

Next to him, Agatha had made a low sound of pain and distress, unlike anything Tarvek had ever heard from her before. The look she gave him was wild-eyed and distressed— “Did you feel that?” She asked, like she needed him to confirm that this was happening, that they’d _lost him_ , that it wasn’t just Agatha who’d _noticed_.

“I should’ve _kidnapped_ him,” Tarvek swore. “I should’ve— I should’ve _chained him to my arm_ like he tied me down to _Tryggvassen_ — it would’ve been easy enough to _switch_ them—”

Madness ate at him, and he prodded at the suddenly _empty space_ where Gil used to be as if Tarvek would have been able to _find him again_ if he just _pushed hard enough_ and _followed the signal to where it led—_

“Tarvek,” Agatha said, but Tarvek could barely hear her through the sudden silence inside of him, shuddering as she grabbed onto him tightly, fingers pressing into the skin of his arm as if to reassure herself that he, at least, was still there.

“He’s not dead,” Agatha told him. Firmly, like she was daring the world to prove her wrong. Like she was going to _make_ it true in that remarkable way of changing the world that she had, even if it wasn’t.

“All that work,” Tarvek said in a hollow voice, and knew he was referring to so many things. “All that work and we just—”

“He’s _not_ dead,” Agatha repeated, the grip on his arm nearly unbearable except for the _realness_ of it, pain keeping him anchored to the ground.

They hadn’t even known that there was a persistent effect from the _Si Vales Valeo_. It was only in sudden absence that they were even able to define the edges of what there had been, the two of them drifting like a steam ship with no engine, surrounded by a vast and terrible sea.

* * *

The next time Tarvek sees a window, it’s long past midnight. After ferrying a delivery of blender parts to a mechanic in the 17th sector, his next task turned out to be finding a certain quality of masonry stone for an airshipman in the 4th sector. Accordingly, Tarvek’s on the starboard side of the castle, helping Shoshannah Summerfield, a giant of a young woman and a constructor second class, carry a series of heavy, suspiciously unmarked boxes from one end of the ship to another in return for the stone he needs.

It’s the first time that Tarvek’s seen the city from the outside. Through the tempered glass of the airship windows, Tarvek can see the larger part of the valley, the landscape stained with night. The wall of thorns sprawls out in all directions from the city walls, infinitely more threatening than the bonsai hedge that had trapped the Storm King. In the center of the maze is Mechanicsburg itself, shining and still under the sick pink-purple of frozen time.

Tarvek had _been there_. If there is any doubt that they are living in an age of myth, just _seeing_ the trapped city makes it clear.

Of course, the decidedly larger than life statues of Agatha that ring Mechanicsburg drive the point home a little further.

“Hell’s rust, but those are enormous,” Tarvek breathes, caught up in the sheer _size_ of them. Tarvek can’t quite imagine that Agatha’s been happy to see how Gil’s redecorated her ancestral home. His taste in statuary is _completely_ overblown, and just as plebian as Tarvek would’ve expected it to be.

“Oh yeah, the statues,” Summerfield says. “You’re not on base that often, are you? Takes getting used to. They were a pain in the ass to build.”

“You worked on them?” Tarvek asks her, turning away from the window.

Summerfield shrugs, the motion jostling the unmarked box she has hefted on it. It makes a sound somewhere between a series of windchimes and a rock tumbler. “Yeah, right when most of the big construction was going up in the valley and at the Gap. The things were a _massive_ pain, and not just ‘cause of their size. All sort of fiddly wiring went into ‘em; they’re what’s holding most of the containment field together on the wall, slowing it down enough that the guys on the ground can actually cut it back now and again.”

“Did you work on the Gap, too?” Tarvek asks.

“Mm,” Summerfield hums. “Town was in bad shape when I got there. Hell, by the sound of it you’re _from there_ , you know what happened if you’re still here to talk to me about it.”

“It’s when I joined on,” Tarvek lies. “Got picked up by the bug hunters when the Baron and the city dropped in,” he pauses, and the grimace that crosses his face isn’t entirely affected. “The spark makes you immune, but it doesn’t keep you alive, you know?”

Tarvek looks out the window, watches the valley drift lazily beneath them, Mechanicsburg moving towards the city’s stern as the great airship circles its holdings. When the Baron’s people picked him up in Sturmhalten, Tarvek was just conscious enough to watch his city _burn_. It hadn’t been a good home, or a good life, but it had been _his_ , just another failure in the list of things he couldn’t save, or protect.

“I haven’t been back since the siege,” Tarvek says, heart aching with the memory of it, the terror and the madness of losing what felt like _everthing_ before he learned there was still more that could be stripped from him.

“You were at Mechanicsburg too?” Summerfield asks, sounding impressed. “Damn, I dunno if that’s good or bad luck.”

“It’s something alright,” Tarvek mutters. “I was in the hospital right around when the whole town started getting shelled.”

“So you enlisted for evac rights?” Summerfield asks.

“Health insurance,” Tarvek tells her, and she laughs. “I wanted to get back home for the reconstruction, but—” he sighs. “I guess I was just busy, going wherever they needed me. I ran out of time.”

“Well, it’s fixed up now,” Summerfield assures him. “The infrastructure was surprisingly solid; heating system was weird as hell, but it was still humming even after the town got razed. Not a lot of tenants, least, not when I was there last. But people were moving in again, mostly refugees; travelers who lost people in Mechanicsburg, or who were from the outlying towns.”

“Any idea who the prince is lately?” Tarvek asks. “Or princess; the old prince had two kids, and last I heard they both got out.”

“The baron’s holding the lands under his eye, for now,” Summerfield tells him. “Some cousin of the old ruling family tried crawling out of the woodwork for it once the reconstruction finished, but the baron sent him packing since the inheritors were still at large. Said he’d give it over when the real heir turned up, but not before then.”

“Huh,” Tarvek muses, incredulous. _“Huh,”_ he says again, because, Gil, _really—_ “Bet the cousin wasn’t well pleased about that,” he says, putting the little spark of _wonder_ away in his chest for a time when he’s not courting death.

Summerfield laughs again, the sound of it reverberating in her barrel chest and the wide hallway. “Crazy to see,” she tells him, shaking her head with a grin Tarvek can hear even with her back to him. “This big redheaded guy in all his nice white finery, looking down at the new boss, who was up to his elbows in grease and masonry dust. He laid half the cornerstones himself, and this duke is just prancing around on his nice white horse, _demanding_ that the baron look at him. And the baron just—”

Summerfield wheezes, her laugh choking a little. “The baron doesn’t even _look_ at him, just keeps laying bricks like he was any other guy there, and says: ‘if you really want to be useful, you can help with the sewer expedition. It’s your family that knows best what’s down in the filth, after all.’ I thought the guy was gonna start shitting bricks,” Summerfield confides in Tarvek, shaking her head. “The new baron’s barely older than _you,_ and here he is, ignoring this big fancy nobleman twice his age like _he_ was the one in the mud, and the baron was the one with the gold-embroidered jacket.”

“Now I _really_ wish I’d gone home,” Tarvek says, and _means it._ “I’d have paid _good money_ to see that.”

“Too bad you were on the run,” Summerfield commiserates. “Hell, they must’ve put you on the evac roster with the rest of the wounded _real_ fast if you don’t have either of your campaign pins.”

“Somebody made pins?” Tarvek asks her.

Ahead of him, Summerfield nods. “Yeah, hold up, lemme show you,” carefully, she turns around, putting both of her heavy boxes on the ground with another grinding thud of stone and glass. Pinned to her overalls are a series of round iron symbols. “Sturmhalten,” she says, pointing to a stylized wasp impaled on a winged sword, a gear taking up the rest of the circle. “Mechanicsburg,” she adds, indicating what appears to be a blend of the Heterodyne and Wulfenbach crests, the trilobite sitting superimposed on the winged castle, with a sword behind the rook. Looking closely, Tarvek sees that the sword and the rook seem to be sharing their wings.

Tarvek’s throat feels tight, and dry.

“Want me to get copies to you?” Summerfield asks him kindly.

“I—” Tarvek manages, swallowing roughly. “Yes, please.”

“Then I will,” Summerfield assures him. “When you come back through here later with my custom suspenders, I’ll throw in the pins for free. As a favor to a friend,” she adds, and Tarvek nods, not sure of what to say.

With tired hands, he takes his burden back up, the box clinking bizarrely as he moves it. Outside, the valley continues to drift past, and with it the night, Mechanicsburg shining, impervious to all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Nightmares about falling to one's death; child abuse resulting in a murder; the inherent creepiness that was the late prince trying to download his lover into the body of his own daughter.
> 
> I finished this chapter instead of sleeping again. Whoops. I still have a lot of feelings about The Haus That Klaus Built, but it's been Gil, lately, who's been putting it back together.
> 
> Anyway, if you can't tell by now, this story involves a lot of alternate mythology, mostly deviations from real Arthurian legends to fit the flavor of the GG universe. The worst of this is surrounding how Arthur took the throne and secured the loyalty of his first knights. E.g. instead of there being a tournament held to find the person fit to wield Uther's sword, King Ector (Cai's dad and Arthur's foster dad) was safeguarding the dead Uther's lands, and hiding his son as his own ward until the kingdom went to war. Needing a blade for the battle as opposed to the tournament that occurs in the 'canon' mythology, Cai sends Arthur out to find him one, and Arthur (as in 'canon') unknowingly pulls his father's sword out of an anvil, and gives it to his brother. As both Ector and Cai die in battle in this version, Merlin, not Ector, is the one to recognize the provenance of the sword that Cai returns with, and exhorts Arthur to claim his birthright, with Bedwyr taking Ector's place as Arthur's second knight to swear.
> 
> But, trust me, you can't actually make Arthurian mythology any more bizarre than it was to start with. As I make more deviations from Arthurian myth for the sake of the story, I'll explain the differences in the end notes of the chapters where I do that.


	3. The Tusk of Ysgithyrwyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third task. End of Act One.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm publishing this from aboard an Amtrak train!
> 
> Warnings are in the end note.

When Tarvek broke through, he was alone. It wasn’t a long time coming, after he got home. He was greeted coolly by his sister, reprimanded by his father, then forgotten, packed off with an endless list of nannies and tutors to make up for the education he had lost.

Sturmhalten was real in a way that Castle Wulfenbach hadn’t been. Stone pressed in on all sides, heavy and solid. The mountains loomed beyond the palace walls, the lightning moat danced between the town and the castle, with all the anger and noise of a flock of displaced birds. The catacombs stretched endlessly underneath Tarvek’s feet, and every inch of masonry and elegantly scrolled wallpaper reminded him that _this_ was where he belonged.

And it was cold, and silent, and empty.

And Tarvek had thought, under all that infinite quiet— _I can fix that._

So he did.

Afterwards, Tarvek could never figure out quite how he’d accomplished what he had. Most of his breakthrough is lost to him, the memories shrouded in a haze of aimless, penetrating understanding, the details all blacked out by mania and exhaustion. The entirety of the castle’s and most of the surrounding town’s central heating was redone, most of the mechanism relying on the same current that fed the moat being run through silver at a temperature high enough to keep it molten.

But what Tarvek can recall is what it had felt like to be able to _do_ something, the deep understanding that he _could_. It was as if life was a stage play, and Tarvek had been allowed behind the scenes to see how the world all hung together, how he too could write his own stories. Tarvek remembers, like a distant echo, the unbearably warm feel of lightning in his hands, running through shining silver and muted by the barrier of his gloves, the way it had sounded arcing through the bare air inside the stonework of wherever he had been.

Tarvek remembers, too, the way a soldier had pulled him kicking and complaining from the floor of the Rusted Swan, a tavern at the city’s outskirts, tired and hungry but satisfied and _not cold anymore_.

No one was quite sure how long he’d been gone. Tarvek’s nanny was fired for losing him, and even she was unsure of when he’d first gone missing, and once she noticed he was absent, she’d been too afraid to tell the prince. The range of estimates was that he’d disappeared for longer than a week, a little less than two. The most consistent guess was nine days.

After that Tarvek was bathed, fed, and presented to the prince. Tarvek had thought his father would be proud of him, for breaking through at such an early age, and heating the _entire town_ as well as the castle. Instead, his father was disappointed that Tarvek could not remember how he’d done what he had, thus making it impossible to reproduce or refine without running the risk of catastrophic failure. The heating was deemed an extravagant waste on the townsfolk, but the increase in civilian goodwill and the guise of benevolence it leant the ruling family was so noted that the prince merely increased taxes to cover the cost of the lightning and the silver, and then a little more for good measure. Once it was clear that there was no information to be had out of Tarvek, his father sent him away again, with the comment that _‘at least this one didn’t leave any bodies behind.’_

It was the last time Tarvek failed to take notes on his own methods and processes. It was also, incidentally, the last time he expected his father to be proud of him.

* * *

Tarvek’s watch runs perfectly now. The gears hardly click at all anymore, just loud enough that he can hear it if he holds it up to his ear, steady enough that he can _just_ feel the mechanisms turning under his fingers. Considering that the watch is something he picked up in Castle Heterodyne during the siege after losing his own when the Baron took Sturmhalten, Tarvek had been mildly surprised that it even ran when he found it. Though, considering the watch _is_ a Heterodyne work, and whatever they build, they build it to last.

The watch is also frighteningly ostentatious and not at all to his taste, being an obnoxiously large baroque trilobite that springs open to reveal a clock face, and now, thanks to Gil, a two-ringed calendar on the inside of the cover. It’s heavy and brass and probably has some murderous secondary function Tarvek hasn’t found yet. Unless its use as a murder weapon is as a blunt object, which is entirely possible; Agatha’s family wasn’t nice either.

But it’s all Tarvek has to keep time with right now when, on the go as he is. It’s a good reminder of Agatha, as well. Tarvek can still _feel_ her, the third heartbeat in his chest, steady and strong even as she journeys in unknown places, but there’s something reassuring about carrying her symbol with him as a reminder. They’re going to meet again.

According to the watch, Tarvek’s been awake for _far_ too long, all of a day and most of the night. It’s alright (he can _make_ it alright) as long he’s not sitting down, though pragmatically speaking, he can’t keep this up indefinitely. His heart, for one, has not quite been happy with him; Tarvek’s extremities keep tingling on him, and he’s getting more and more short of breath, his chest aching.

But he can keep going for _as long as he has to_ ; he knows some tricks; the way of the smoke often leads almost exclusively into enemy territory, and knows to teach its operatives how to fight fatigue. Part of that means staying on his feet, and trying to conduct as many deals as possible while one the move, which, he has to say, is really helping with his efficiency.

And even tired, Tarvek’s not about to let himself get swindled by a _cavalryman_ , even if he _is_ a captain.

“Twenty kilos of liquid copper, and not any less,” Michelakis tells him, using his lantern jaw to good effect as he frowns.

“Fifteen kilos and you’ll melt it yourself,” Tarvek shoots back, his own posture light and easy. “You’re a smart man, captain, you can figure it out.”

At least, assuming the captain is smart is a reasonable bet. Kastor Michelakis runs a platoon attached to the 12th Cavalry Division, and he’s home for shore leave, from what Tarvek can tell. Though leaving the front to return to a base and counting that as _leave_ baffles Tarvek, he can understand thinking of this city as _home_.

Of course, he’s also trying to cheat Tarvek out of a favor at a _ridiculous_ price; Tarvek’s learned, finally, the general going rate for under the table services on the city, and what Michelakis is asking for (twenty kilos of _molten copper_ in exchange for a day’s patience on a backed up order of custom shoes for the stable of cloven-hoofed lions his division liberated on their last trip to the front) _is not it_.

“I’m going to be on the road by this time tomorrow; I don’t have the equipment for that sort of thing,” Michelakis insists, trying to look as firm as he can manage in a neck brace.

Tarvek rolls his eyes. “I _know_ that sergeant Naim broke through last month. If you can’t find a way to _keep metal hot_ between the two of you, then I despair for his education and your lack of ingenuity.”

Michelakis looks startled, eyes going wide before they narrow, the captain hunching down, trying to be furtive as best he can in a neck brace. “How did you know that?” He hisses.

“Everyone knows. It’s not like anyone in your platoon was being _subtle_ ,” Tarvek says, sniffing. It helps, too, that Tarvek helped peel half of sergeant Naim’s unit off the floor of one of the hallways after they decided to drink away their misfortune of having a new spark for an officer.

“Look,” Michelakis offers, clearly grasping at straws. “Don’t tell anyone else, and I’ll cut the order down a few kilos if you trade me the watch.”

“Sorry,” Tarvek tells him, returning it back to its place on his toolbelt. “It was a gift.”

“Tough bargain.” Michelakis frowns. “Not even for another two kilos off the order?”

“Not even for a better watch,” Tarvek says, and smiles about it, because there isn’t a reason why _not to._ “I’ll keep your secret, though,” Tarvek assures him. “He’s your friend, right?”

“I—” Michelakis looks like he’s about to protest, shoulders tensing. Then, instead, he slumps a little. “Yeah, he’s my friend,” Michelakis says, resigned. “A pain in my ass, but a friend. I’m not seeing him promoted just to be put somewhere sterile when all he ever wanted was to work with horses.”

“Then go talk to Garret Miller,” Tarvek advises him, pitching his voice low in sympathy. “About Naim, I mean. He’s good at hiding things, and the sergeant’s not the only one who could use some tutoring on subtlety while you’re all here.”

“I will,” Michelakis tells him. “And I’ll drop to nineteen kilos, for that advice.”

“Nine,” Tarvek counters, and Michelakis breathes out through his nose.

“Fifteen,” the captain offers, and holds out the hand that’s not in a sling for Tarvek to shake. “Fifteen and I’m not going any lower, you snake.”

“Pleasure doing business with you, sir,” Tarvek tells him, and picks up the pace through the hallway to outstrip him, making sure he does not sway on his feet.

* * *

When they were children, Gil and Tarvek had started a cartography project. Tarvek had been instructed to find a blueprint of the airship city, and upon finding that no such thing accurately _existed_ , he determined to create one himself. And Gil had helped, because there was no one who knew the ship like he did, no one who understood its ways and spoke its language and knew its people, having lived there, he assured Tarvek, nearly all of his life, or at least as much of it as he could remember.

It had been fun. Whatever else Tarvek can say about what the two of them used to be to each other, exploring the castle had been _fun_ , Gil’s presence and good-natured insistence on a series of pranks and detours turning what should’ve been a months’ long test of endurance and sanity into an aimless adventure that was valuable for its own sake, and spanned nearly the whole length of their friendship.

It’s strange, now, to walk the halls without Gil here. Even after Tarvek’s exile, once he was _kidnapped_ back into the fold, he’d been confined to one room until Gil’s return. Lately, it’s been the same; Gil’s been there since Tarvek _woke up_. He was, quite literally, the first thing that Tarvek saw on his return to Wulfenbach space and to his own miserable existence, and Tarvek feels him now through some unquantifiable sixth sense, distant, in the airship; nearer still than Agatha.

It’s been years, yet there’s a part of Tarvek that still knows these halls best through someone else, that keeps listening, straining for the sound of bare feet slapping on the metal floor, or some echo of the children’s songs they used to sing.

* * *

Tarvek does not have any fond memories of the ship’s grease traps. They’re hot, they _smell_ , and they used to be reserved for the students to clean, as a punishment for bad behavior. Tarvek and Gil, of course, were almost constantly getting thrown in here, and more often than not it was _Gil’s fault_ , because that’s just the sort of person he is, and always has been.

Technically speaking, it’s Gil’s fault that Tarvek’s back here this time, too. If Tarvek didn’t need to negotiate for the specific industrial grade lubricant that the greasetraps create as a waste byproduct in order to get to Mechanicsburg, he would’ve been happy to never come back here.

The greasetraps have not changed in the fifteen years of what Tarvek had believed would be a permanent absence. They still stink, they’re still dark save for the glow of the wall strips and the boiling grease, and they’re still abominably hot. Tarvek can feel the grease and the sweat collecting on his skin, and he shudders with disgust.

“Is there anything to drink around here?” Tarvek asks. It occurs to him that the reason his throat hurts is almost _certainly_ dehydration; he hasn’t really stopped to rest, at any point since noon.

“Unless you wanna drink the grease?” Rumena Hadjiev, mechanic thrid class, frowns at him. “This ain’t exactly a mess hall.”

“Fair,” Tarvek agrees. “But it really is damn hot.”

Hadjiev grins at him, her round face dirty and shining in the low light. “You get used to it,” she assures him. “And it’s a hell of a lot better than winters in Burgas. Here, I only have to wear layers for protection from burns. At home, I’d have to wear layers for protection from frostbite.”

“The difference being?” Tarvek asks, working stubbornly at a spot of burnt grease fat.

“The difference being that I can heal a burn. I can’t heal back lost toes and fingers,” Hadjiev says. “Long as I work in here, no one tries to make me go outside in the snow. It’s a good deal.”

“I don’t know, I think you could definitely lose a finger to some of these machines,” Tarvek says.

Hadjiev scoffs. “Only if you’re slow.”

Tarvek eyes the machinery with a little more wariness, trying to shake some heat back into his cold, tingling fingers. He doesn’t exactly feel _fast_ , right now. As it is, he mostly just feels overheated and shaky.

Sighing, Tarvek unbuttons his collar, and shoves his filthy sleeves a little higher up behind his elbows. He wants a shower, but that’s not exactly in the future.

“Anyway, I’ll be good for lubricant; as you can see, it basically sloughs right off the walls around here. I can get you as much as you need long as you bring something to carry it in and collect it yourself. You’ve been helpful enough already that the rest of the—” Hardjiev cuts herself off, staring.

“What?” Tarvek asks, feeling pinned.

Hardjiev gestures to her own neck, green eyes large in the dimness.

Carefully, Tarvek reaches for his own neck, and finds nothing other than some tenderness. “What?” He asks again, confused.

“You’ve got—” she hisses, before stopping again. Exasperated, she grabs him by the wrist, and spins him to face the wall. With her free hand, Hardjiev wipes the wall down under a lamp with a rag until the metal shines, and points at Tarvek’s neck. “Look!” She demands.

There, on his neck are dark marks, bruises well defined in the shape of someone’s fingers. “Oh,” Tarvek says. So that’s why his throat’s been hurting.

Hardjiev lets go of his wrist and slaps him. _“‘Oh?!’”_ She screeches. “That’s all you can say about that?! You look like someone tried to kill you! You’re no soldier; how the hell did you get that?”

Tarvek presses careful fingers into the wound, probing the bruise before Hardjiev hisses, slaps his hand away again. “I got it by the hand of my friend,” Tarvek tells her, laughing internally at the darkness his own joke.

“You need better friends,” Hardjiev tells him seriously. “Like, you got an officer to talk to, about that?”

“Not anywhere near here, no,” Tarvek tells her. “I’m just on the castle for a pickup.”

“Then what fucking ‘friend’ did you even see, that they decided to give you _that_?” She asks, voice dripping with scorn.

“An old one,” Tarvek explains, hand wandering back up to his neck. “I hadn’t— it’d been awhile, for the both of us.”

“You have _got_ to get better friends,” Hardjiev says again. “Nobody who cares about you treats you like that.”

“He’s what I’ve got,” Tarvek says, and Hardjiev hisses again.

“Then you need to get the hell off this ship,” she says.

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Tarvek tells her, and touches lightly at the bruises, marveling at the color of them; purple, yellow, black.

* * *

Bedwyr was Arthur’s second knight, and he was Cai’s friend. Or rather, it’s probably clearer to say that he was Arthur’s second knight _because_ he was Cai’s friend. Someone had to bring the body back, you see— someone had to survive the battle of Caerleon in order for Cai to come home and be resurrected.

Not to say that Bedwyr got away unscathed. He lost a hand, at Caerleon. He was a spark, though; it stands to reason that he should’ve had it replaced. But in all the stories Tarvek ever read, Bedwyr never did. It was penance, the tales asserted; Bedwyr couldn’t save his friend, nor his king (and oh, how that would come to define him), so he left his hand on the battlefield, and simply tied a shield to what was left of his forearm.

Bedwyr had known Arthur, when the king was still a child, the simple association with his brother enough to tie their fates together. Bedwyr owed the child king nothing but respect for his bloodline, but Bedwyr swore anyway, out of gratitude for the life of his friend, and so that Cai would not go into his new life alone.

‘I will do this thing,’ Cai’s oaths would go, ‘by the hand of my friend, I will do it.’

And every time, Bedwyr would sit there and laugh at the joke, at another day spent being alive.

* * *

Being a city so large, castle Wulfenbach has more than one of everything. A single point of failure is generally regarded as a design flaw in civil engineering, and the airship city is a masterwork of synthesis if nothing else, aeronautics notwithstanding. So, as it is with the engineworks, it is with the infirmaries. Castle Wulfenbach, as well as the rest of the fleet, has its medical needs attended to by a staggered set of vertical hospitals that cross-section the ship-city at strategic points. Every floor has its own triage and operating theater so that the wounded don’t have to be jostled in any elevators, and every hospital has its own staff from the extended Hospitaller Corps. Tarvek can only imagine that being assigned to work triage in the city’s medical wards to be less taxing that being a field medic, but given the bloodshed he’s seen in the last 72 hours alone, Tarvek is becoming less and less sure of that supposition.

The central column hospital, most commonly and unimaginatively referred to as ‘Central,’ is presided over by Dr. Cohen, the ship’s head medical officer. It was Cohen who treated Tarvek for his poisoning once Gil got him back to the airship, and Tarvek figures that he’ll have an easier time wrangling what he needs out of him than out of any of the other members of the hospitallers. And considering that Tarvek is able to corner him in his office, there’s no need for the pretense of another identity; hopefully, this task should be quick, and easy.

“Hello, Dr. Cohen,” Tarvek says.

“Prince Sturmvoraus?” The good doctor blinks. “You’re early for your check in. I thought I was going to have to drag you in, given that word is you’ve been keeping pace with the baron. He’s gotten a bit, well, _infamous_ for avoiding the infirmary. Usually we draw straws on who’s going to have to bring him in before he collapses.”

Cohen pauses. “Or _when_ he collapses, more often,” the doctor amends. “The baron tends to put up a fight if we’re not opportunistic about our timing.”

“Well, you have nothing to fear on that front from me,” Tarvek assures him. “Unlike that libertine, I take care of myself.”

Cohen blinks again, looking flustered as he reaches for a set of clean gloves. “Well, as long as you’re here, I can conduct the examination now, and change your bandages. On the table, please,” he instructs. “Shirt off, as well, if you don’t mind.”

Tarvek, who had already started moving towards the table, stills a little. But he does as is expected of him, and doesn’t complain.

Carefully, Tarvek unbuttons his dirty shirt, shrugging off his suspenders as well. The shirt started life this morning pristine white; now, against the sheet over the exam table, it looks as filthy as Tarvek feels, several shades darker than its resting place.

“How did you get these bruises, Prince Sturmvoraus?” Dr. Cohen asks him, prodding carefully with gloved hands.

“I got into a fight,” Tarvek says, and though Cohen doesn’t look like he buys that at all, he says nothing, something for which Tarvek is desperately grateful.

“Well, there’s nothing much you can do about them,” Cohen tells him. “It looks worse than it is, and it’s not going to stop looking like that until your skin heals. Though,” he adds, “if you’ve been experiencing issues with the personnel aboard, I’m sure the baron would be more than happy to help you sort them.”

“Of course,” Tarvek says, and is proud he doesn’t sound as strangled as he looks.

Dr. Cohen undoes the bandages with careful, precise movements, snipping through the front of the mass and removing the gauze pad that’s been stained a palette of unhealthy colors after exposure to Tarvek’s broken skin.

“Well,” the doctor says mildly, “that’s not good.”

With medicine’s protection gone, the wound reveals itself: ugly, bleeding slowly, not possible to stitch entirely closed due to the way Tweedle’s poison had eaten right through Tarvek’s skin. The injury itself looks nearly like an acid or an electrical burn; fragile edges, pink-red-black, impossibly thin threads trying to pull it all closed without fracturing his skin any farther.

According to the analysts who examined the poison from his blood samples, and his own knowledge of Tweedle’s vicious pragmatism, Tarvek’s body was almost certainly supposed to have _dissolved_. To a certain extent, it already has; his heart and arteries are weaker now, the walls of his veins thinner, his blood pressure lower.

It’s strange, to think how close he came to dying. Now that Tarvek _has_ actually died, felt the life slip from his body and felt two other people come rushing back in, it’s hard to be afraid anymore, of the other side. The unknown country is known to Tarvek, now, on its edges. Yet watching Dr. Cohen carefully blot at his chest with a clean gauze before pressing a second one onto the wound, inspecting the stitches with scrutiny before he wraps Tarvek’s chest in fresh bandages— it’s hard to ignore, the scant distance between his feet and the edge.

“You’ve overtaxed yourself,” the doctor scolds him. “No wonder your hands are shaking.”

Startled, Tarvek looks down at his hands; there _is_ a fine tremor working through his fingers. They look and feel bloodless, and the worst part is, Tarvek hadn’t _noticed_.

“What happened to the bed rest I prescribed you?” Dr. Cohen asks him.

“It’s a bit hard to get any of that, around here,” Tarvek says faintly, and the doctor’s answering snort is both wry and irritated.

“Every last one of you,” he says, shaking his head. “Not a single person in the ranks here can just take it easy. You all have to make my life _difficult._ ”

“Sorry?”

“No you’re not. You’re just sorry you got caught. Is there anything else?” Dr. Cohen asks, stripping off his gloves with careful efficiency.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” Tarvek says. “I was wondering if I could get access to some extra-strength liquid sealant?”

“You could requisition some, I’m sure,” the doctor tells him. “But it might take some time to get your hands on. I have a jar, but it’s not exactly something we have a lot of on hand, due to how quickly we move through it.” Cohen pauses. “Though, as a physician, I have to strongly advise against obtaining it for your own use. The risk of blood infection is simply higher than I’d be willing to risk on a wound as unnatural as yours is.”

“It’s not for me,” Tarvek explains. “Though I doubt you’d believe me if I told you why I needed it.”

“I’ve been to medical school, prince Sturmvoraus,” Cohen reminds him. “I’m sure whatever you have in mind can’t be any more preposterous than what some of the sparks I studied with came up with.”

“I need it so a heliolux yeoman can repair her living blimp pet who was punctured in last night’s skirmish,” Tarvek says blandly. “Once I get that done, she’ll give me the surprisingly well preserved bones of the parakeet she used to keep before this. Then I can give the bones to a minor spark in the 47th Airborne who needs them for a candy making project in return for his collection of vintage of mason jars. Once I have the jars,” Tarvek continues, plodding relentlessly through the farce his life has become, “I can trade them to one of the city’s sewage maintenance workers, for purposes I’d really rather not contemplate, in return for safe passage through the ship’s underbelly for an amateur urban spelunker in the the 14th Scouting regiment.”

“And in return for that—” Tarvek takes a deep breath. “Well. I’m sure you don’t want me to bore you with the details.”

From the medicine cabinet, Cohen stares at him, eyes wide behind his glasses. “I don’t think ‘bore’ is the verb you’re looking for,” he says faintly, but pulls a jar of sealant out nonetheless. “Though if I understood that all correctly, you’ve been ignoring my instructions to avoid harsh manual labor with your heart like this.”

“It was unavoidable.” Tarvek shrugs, feeling more than a little frayed. “I’m supposing you’ll want a favor of your own?”

Dr. Cohen looks at him thoughtfully. “Not really,” he says, “but if you’d like, just for tradition’s sake, there is something you could do for me.”

“Wonderful,” Tarvek says tiredly. “Why not? Might as well round it all out.”

“Can you bring the baron in for his check in? He was in the seventh ward this morning, but mostly to interfere with the triage.” Cohen frowns, an expression that would be a scowl on anyone less mildly dispositioned. “He knew better than to try that here; I would’ve had him sedated. So of course he’s started going elsewhere to get his hands dirty in other people’s operating theaters.”

“If you threaten to sedate him, I can’t imagine why you’d expect him to keep coming here,” Tarvek points out. He’s a bit proud of himself, that he keeps himself steady. A wave of cold rolls through him, prickling his skin and his lungs as it goes.

“Oh, I don’t threaten,” Dr. Cohen explains patiently, albeit a bit scandalized. “Threats imply you won’t follow through. I just did it, the last time he was in to try and treat someone. That kept him out of the way, and it meant sure I could finally remove the stitches he’d nearly let fester. The baron was very tired,” the doctor continues modestly. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten the drop on him otherwise.”

Tarvek rather doubts that, but all he can think of is the faint feeling of music in his head from two distant sources, and the crushing _fear, fear, fear_ of stuck corners and windowless rooms that weighs down on his bones.

“I’ll bring him,” Tarvek promises, dull voiced and mechanical. “It’s probably about time someone checked on his health, the way he’s been running around.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Cohen says. “I’ll give this to you when you come back.”

“No, thank _you_ ,” Tarvek replies, and walks from the room on heavy feet, exhaustion warring with adrenaline in his necrotized veins.

* * *

When he came back from Paris, Tarvek had still thought he was Arthur. That he was saving Anevka from war, and death, and ruin. The sword soon, he’d thought; he had already found the first of his Muses. The sword soon, and then there would be no need for their father and his horrible, life-rending plans.

It was some time before Tarvek realized the truth of the situation, the dread humanity underneath the fairytales he and Anevka had both had loved as children. One night, Tarvek watched the clank that thought she was his sister waltz, and could only think of Tinka, barely able to speak, now too clumsy to dance. He’d wondered, then, if the quiet void in his chest was anything like what Bedwyr had felt, carrying his friend’s dying body off the battlefield, Cai’s lifeblood slipping through his fingers, Bedwyr barely able to grip him with just one hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The metaphor for Tarvek's breakthrough (re: stagecraft) is brought to you by [Nevilles_Gran](http://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran) a.k.a. tumblr's [Tanoraqui](http://tanoraqui.tumblr.com).
> 
> Gil next!
> 
> Warnings for this chapter are as follows: Child abuse - specifically neglect, both emotional and physical from multiple sources; Domestic violence - well, sort of. Gil attacks Tarvek in _Fisher King_ in a moment of dubious lucidity after Tarvek specifically tries to get Gil to react violently. This is taken as a sign of domestic violence by someone who runs into Tarvek in this chapter, and they're not entirely wrong about that, considering that there's definitely _something_ going on between the boys, and that encounter certainly wasn't indicative of anything healthy; Body horror/gore - we get a description of Tarvek's chest wound, and it's pretty gross.


	4. Twrch Trwyth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fourth task. Intermission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Hanukkah, y'all. Enjoy this, my present to you.
> 
> See the end of the chapter for content warnings. There's spoilers in there, but I honestly couldn't figure out how to warn for any of this in an adequate way without telling you what happens. Either way, read at your own risk.
> 
> Here's the spoiler free list of warnings: Blood and gore; Child abuse; Murder; Domestic abuse; Suicide; Emotional manipulation. The end's going to have all the expansions. Please let me know if I missed anything.

Anevka cried, at their mother’s funeral. Great, fat tears and shaking sobs, a grief that moved her whole body like the moon pulled the sea. Her eyes were red for days afterwards, her face pale and sick. Their father held her right hand as she wept, and Tarvek had the other, the three of them an unbroken line before the coffin as they gave Sturmhalten’s princess to the earth.

Tarvek doesn’t remember his mother very well. Enough to have missed her, as a child, and enough to know he shouldn’t have. Her voice (like church bells from over the mountain) was what Tarvek held onto, in the time that came after: A calm word explaining to Tarvek the nature of the rule; Vicious arguments with his father that the castle’s walls swallowed whole; Sharp lectures dissecting his sister; The story of how, with the help of Van Rijin and the night, Andronicus won his crown.

It helped (as much as anything could) keep at bay the worst of his childhood nightmares: his sister’s ungloved hands gripping a scalpel, dripping gore, and the spark-mad way she spoke about understanding, like it was a prize that suffering paid for.

The next time Tarvek saw his sister cry in front of him, it was after he returned from Paris, and found her half-dead at their father’s hands, screaming with what was left of her voice.

* * *

Gil is in one of the starboard briefing rooms when Tarvek finds him, crossing from one crisis to another. For a moment, Tarvek can’t help but expect to see Gil as he left him, covered in death, so close to disaster. Fortunately, Gil has changed into another cloak since this morning; unfortunately, it’s an unflattering shade of brown.

Gil strides through the room with purpose,surrounded by his court. DuPree at his right hand, Higgs at his left, Gritha and Susa following behind. Gil prods at DuPree with an air of the familial, responding to needling that Tarvek cannot hear from the doorway with an aggravated humor that makes Tarvek’s chest ache while Higgs looks on in disapproval.

Susa says something to Gil, hopping from her sister’s hand to her baron’s shoulder, relaying some information to his ear. In the moment it takes for her to catch his attention, Gil’s whole bearing changes; spine straightening out of its tired curve, a curious, neutral expression, ready to command and to receive. He divides his attention with an ease that speaks to a practice most sparks never get, not lost in either conversation, shoving away the jabbing hand DuPree aims at his ribs even as Susa quite literally bends his ear.

Gil wears kingliness well. Or rather, kingship wears Gil well; Tarvek is aware of the scant distinction. He can’t even blame the Baron’s ghost for this; the people need their king. Tarvek’s family would claim that _they_ manufactured that need, but Tarvek knows better, has seen behind the curtain: all his family ever did was tell Europa that she needed a _specific_ monarch.

Gil shines, in the right light. Here, away from the struggles of the ground, he presides over the castoff people. Gil took them in, like his father before him, and they in turn rule him.

Tarvek feels the moment that Gil notices his presence, the thing between them humming with an awareness of the distance that remains between them, the sensation like eyes on his back. Gil dismisses his people with his typical awkward grace, DuPree laughing at something he said, Higgs leading her away. Susa leaps back to her sister’s offered hand, and the both of them salute before leaving, all four exiting by the far door, away from Tarvek’s entrance at the side.

Tarvek feels unprepared, suddenly, in the officiousness of this moment, for all that it’s deplorably haphazard. Gil sweeps towards him in the mismatched finery of his house while Tarvek stands there in his borrowed name and working clothes, hat off, filthy, covered in sweat and grease, shaking and ugly like an engine left exposed.

“Doctor Cohen wants you,” Tarvek says, stuffing his cold and trembling hands into his pockets, ignoring the pull behind his breastbone, like a magnet to its opposite twin.

“I’ll go later.” Gil waves it off, leaning towards him, fingers twitching at his sides in a way that makes Tarvek’s paranoia itch. “Where—”

“I’m not sure you understand,” Tarvek cuts him off, settling into his smirk like it will protect him. “You’ve been summoned by the Corps Hospitaller, herr baron. On pain of sedatives, in fact. And while I’m not exactly opposed to you sleeping more often, I figured you’d rather face unconsciousness and possible experimentation on your own terms than otherwise.”

“They have to catch me first if they want to put me down,” Gil says, frowning. “It’s not _them_ I’m worried about—”

“Oh, but that’s just it,” Tarvek says, raising an eyebrow. “They’re not the ones you _should_ worry about; the hospitallers sent _me_ to fetch you, after all. On pain of sedatives, even.”

Gil snorts at him, disbelieving. “Like you’ve ever taken orders in your life.”

“I do when they benefit me,” Tarvek corrects him.

“And how does doing the good doctor’s dirtywork benefit you?” Gil asks, folding his arms across his chest, likely to put a stop to the way his fingers kept reaching out.

“I don’t know, I think it’s fairly obvious,” Tarvek says, ignoring, too, the way Gil looks at him, the barely buried concern. “I get to drag you somewhere you don’t want to go, and you get prodded with various pieces of medical equipment while someone admonishes you. In return, I don’t get sedated against my will.”

Gil huffs, and settles on his heels, rocking back slightly as he rebalances out of the way he’d been looming. “I’m fairly certain that sedatives wouldn’t work on you any better than they would on me,” he says. “And _you’re_ certainly not in any state to drag me to Central; you look like you’re about to be a patient, yourself.”

“Correction: I’ve already _been_ a patient today, _and_ I was cleared for duty, unlike you. I take care of myself. I’m fine,” he tells Gil. “ _You_ , however—”

For a moment, the world spins. Everything grays, spots dancing in Tarvek’s vision. Gil fades out of focus, indistinct and colorless, like a distant memory. Tarvek had been warned, about his blood pressure. It’s his own fault for choosing to ignore it.

“I don’t have to drag you,” Tarvek explains, recollecting himself even as Gil stares. “You’re just going to come with me.”

“Oh yeah? And why is that?” Gil asks, wary, disbelieving.

“You want to know where I’ve been, don’t you?” Tarvek replies, and turns his back on Gil, carrying the weight of his regard from the suddenly small room.

* * *

Arthur found the sword by accident. His brother needed one, you see— the whole kingdom felt the war coming, King Ector calling every blade he had, even though his own son’s had rusted.

Some stories say that Cai sent him for the thing; Arthur was his squire, after all. But Tarvek wonders how much the second son had worried on his own; his brother was tall and strong, an unbeatable figure, but the war could be seen in the blood that clogged the rivers, in the fields that grew strange crops. Arthur would not have let his older brother rush to his death unarmed and empty handed.

Tarvek can only imagine the fear, the worry that the city’s only sword was in an anvil, the omen it must’ve been for Arthur to feel the blade grow warm and sharp under his hands. Tarvek wants to know what Arthur thought, to send it away with his brother, if there had been a prayer that the magic blade would be enough to bring him home.

* * *

“Shirt off, please,” Cohen instructs. “I’d like to see to those stitches from last week.”

Wordlessly, Gil complies, even as he seems to shrink in on himself.

It’s disconcerting to see Gil nervous without Agatha in the room. Then again, her hand in this is tangible; without his shirt and coat of office, the silver crest at Gil’s throat is revealed as a locked choker, and not a signet pin. Gil tugs his starched blue collar out from under the metal, and unbuttons the front, gold skin uncovered in inches.

The whole landscape of Gil’s body has changed, in the time that Tarvek has lost. New scars line his chest; bullet wounds, stab wounds, lines of acid and various burns. Tarvek’s training helps to identify most of Gil’s injuries, and his spark makes conjectures as to the natures of the rest, the multifaceted and unidentifiable wounds, records of the unknowable things that the young baron has survived.

Meanwhile, Gil watches Tarvek throughout his examination. Dr. Cohen pokes and prods him, tutting and hissing through his teeth at the poor care Gil takes of himself, but Gil pays him no attention, focusing it all on Tarvek instead.

Tarvek, for his part, just leans against the wall and watches. It occurs to him that he’s going to have to lose Gil at some point, in order to keep moving forward. He can’t do this job with Gil hovering, and the way he stares now, Tarvek knows he won’t be getting away without difficulty of some sort. The smart thing to do would be to leave now, vanish from Central while Cohen has Gil relatively pinned down. At the same time, however, Tarvek would have to end up back here in order to pick up the sealant from the good doctor in order to finally, _finally_ put a stop to this endless list of errands. Once Tarvek starts running, he’s not going to be able to stop until this is all over, one way or another.

But Tarvek can’t help but fixate on Gil’s new scars, the lines and edges of them; so much of the record that Gil wears on his body should have _killed him_. The stitching in his side that Dr. Cohen is worried about was likely caused by a shrapnel grenade, or a flechette gun of some kind, intended to cause the jagged kind of wounds that always get infected if not tended to properly.

It’s not that Gil was unmarked, before. He’d had his shirt off throughout the _Si Vales Valeo_ procedure (it wasn’t as if either of them could have any sort of cloth in the way of the machinery) and the evidence of his Parisian adventures had stood out in pale relief against the gold of his skin. But these show a level of damage far and beyond anything Gil used to receive at the hands of the villain of the week.

Tarvek sucks a breath in past his teeth, and curses internally. How much of that could he and Agatha have prevented? They should’ve been there. Tarvek should’ve—

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Cohen says, snipping and removing a set of stitches from Gil’s side.

“I— uh.” Gil blinks as he turns to look at the doctor. “I wasn’t aware you were looking for my input, doctor.”

Cohen sighs. “You’re nearly as much of a medic as I am, at this point,” he says. “And you’re the one that’s living in that body, not I. If something is wrong, you need to _tell me_. So, yes, your input would be helpful. Besides,” he adds, “it’s not as if I’ve ever been able to _stop_ you from saying what you please or mucking about in my operating rooms as if you owned them. Don’t think I didn’t get word as soon as you took those poor people to Starboard Mercy.”

“Technically speaking,” Gil says, “I _do_ have a claim to every facility aboard my castle.”

Tarvek snickers, shaking his head, smirking at Gil, and the sound draws Gil’s attention back to Tarvek immediately. It should be disconcerting; it’s not. Just being in the same room as Gil has balanced something in him that Tarvek hadn’t even noticed was out of alignment under every other thing. That, too should disturb him, but instead it just feels right.

“It was a spark work, so it takes a spark to unwork,” Gil explains, still looking at Tarvek as if the words are for _his_ benefit, and not meant for the doctor that has successfully ambushed Gil in the past. “It only stands to reason that I take the theater—”

“We have medical sparks, herr baron, as I’ve told you before, and as you well know considering they’ve been assisting Dr. Richards with that mad project of hers,” Cohen interrupts him, wiping Gil’s healing cuts with antiseptic. “It frustrates some, here, that you come to interfere in our work whenever you’re present at the site of an injury,” the doctor continues, that characteristic mildness of his tuned like a laser. “We need the ability, in the Corps, to monitor our patients and their care even after they leave the city and return to the field. And that involves the paperwork and the chain of custody you subvert by insisting on treating people yourself—”

“It’s efficient,” Gil argues. “And you’re all well-trained enough to follow what I do; I use fairly basic aid techniques, and as you so frequently remind me, we _do_ have medical sparks. If you need someone to decipher my work, you have the personnel.”

Cohen sighs, and sheds his gloves, placing them and the removed stitches in medical waste bin. “And, as I’ve said to you every other time we’ve had this disagreement, the doctors here _and at Starboard Mercy_ all have better things to do than file your neglected paperwork. You can put your shirt back on, now,” the doctor says, as an afterthought.

Tarvek waits, as Gil collects himself. He pulls together with a minimum of care; shirt first, with the collar tugged up under his choker. Then his vest, his coat, the trappings of his office. In simple steps, Gil is the baron again, his feet firm on the steel-plate ground, all these leagues in the air.

“Let’s go,” he says, and this time, Tarvek follows him.

* * *

When Uther died, Merlin, who had blessed him many times before, did the dead king two last favors: he took Uther’s misbegotten son to the house of Ector, and put the king’s sword in an anvil, to better forge a nation when the need arose.

Merlin never told Ector just who Arthur was. It might have been the heart of cruelty, to keep that from him, to let him die without knowing whose son it was his house had raised; Ector loved Uther, enough to win his lands back after the dead king’s passing, and rule it with his own firm hand. But, Tarvek thinks that Ector must’ve known, must’ve seen his friend in his second son’s face, the way he scowled and laughed and followed Cai like a particularly irritated moon. Merlin was crafty, but there were only so many children that a wizard would send to be fostered, and the child’s age was always suspect.

When Cai rode to the battle with Uther’s sword, Ector must’ve recognized the blade his friend had wielded near all his life. Must’ve closed his eyes and at least been comforted that Uther’s son would take their shared lands back, that Arthur, home and safe, would rebuild the country they both had loved.

* * *

“Where did you go, after Moran?” Gil asks him, in the halls. “You owe me an explanation, so you’d better start talking.”

It’s gotten quiet, on the ship. Not silent; the city never truly sleeps, only rests, always singing its own song in the way of metal and steam, the great burning engines keeping motion in the world. The hours are small, and the interior now softly lit, safety lighting, mostly, as the deep night reigns and the castle continues to drift.

“I was looking for leads,” Tarvek says. Leads which he should _really be getting back to_ , actually—

“Leads where?” Gil presses him. “On what? You slipped out after the wounded, and I _couldn’t find you_ , after—”

Tarvek rolls his eyes, and keeps walking. If Gil wants to follow him, that’s Gil’s prerogative; Tarvek will find a way to get out from under him eventually. “What do you think? There was a _bomb_ , today.”

Gil huffs, and falls in alongside him. “There was a bomb yesterday.”

“Don’t be flippant,” Tarvek snaps. “Yesterday a person threw a grenade and you kicked a table into his ribcage; today a person _was_ a grenade, and his ribcage shrapnelized inside three people. That warrants investigating.”

“You’re not in any state to go hunting down assassins,” Gil says, frowning. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Worried about me?” Tarvek asks, smiling tightly.

Now it’s Gil’s turn to roll his eyes, a little bit of a smirk curling his expression. “More that I’m worried I won’t be there when it happens and lose out on the blackmail material.”

“You don’t know _how_ to blackmail,” Tarvek sniffs. “Threaten, sure; you’re good at violence—”

“You just admitted I’m good at something,” Gil says smugly. “You _must_ be tired.”

“Yes,” Tarvek says waspishly, “because _everyone_ wants to be able to beat someone else to death with their hands, what a skill to be proud of—”

“You think I have a _skill_ —” Gil needles him, nearly sing-songing the last word to get under Tarvek’s skin.

“Technically speaking, so is surviving consistently getting ambushed in one’s own keep by random murderers, but you don’t see anyone handing you any awards for _having managed not to die in our absences_ ,” Tarvek snarls, and can hear the madness creeping into the end of the phrase, exhaustion making him careless.

Silence descends on them both like snow, heavy and wet, muting the world around them. Tarvek shivers with the energy humming inside him, the desire to _solve_ sparking in his mind and his fingers. He keeps walking instead of acting on the impulse, strangling it inside him, knowing that hostile territory is not the place to lose himself to the full blown fugue that’s waiting for him.

“What _have_ you been doing?” Gil asks him, eyeing Tarvek with something that might be concern and not suspicion if it were anyone else.

“Fixing things,” Tarvek says shortly, and clenches his fists, spark still rearing up inside him.

* * *

The second sword came from the lake.

Of course, it’s facetious to say ‘the lake’ like it was any water. Arthur’s second sword came from no source but the waves of Avalon itself, the Lady of the Lake parting the veil between the faerie world and the lands of men with the same hand that put a sword in Arthur’s.

A lot of people mistake the stone’s sword for Excalibur. How many magical swords could there be in one mythology, after all? The answer is, of course, too many. Every knight worth his steel had some spark-work blade or another, either out of Bedwyr’s hand, or the more arcane forces of destiny.

But Excalibur, Caledfwlch, Caliburn; whatever name you prefer, the Lady opened the way, and from the other side gave Arthur his second sword.

She said that the blade was the second-best gift she could give to the new, young king. It could cut steel and enchantment, and so long as Arthur held its scabbard, no mortal wound could kill him. Excalibur shone, not the blade of kings, like his fathers’, but the weapon of the other world, metal unreal in ours.

The best gift the Lady could give would be her son. But that was Lancelot’s choice, in the end. All she did was send him forth, and point him where to go. Lancelot chose his doom on his own.

* * *

By the time Gil leads him back to the secret room, Tarvek has gotten something of a grip back on himself. That Gil managed to lead him _anywhere_ without Tarvek catching on, or even seeming like he was taking the lead is worrying. Something is _wrong_ with Tarvek’s situational awareness. He’s gotten nearly as bad as Violetta always accused him of being. If she could see him now, she’d probably smack him silly, or sedate him. Probably both.

Now, when he should be most careful, watching Gil for any signs of possession (outside the apparent, outside of his parent) Tarvek instead is practically unconscious on his feet for all the possible utility of his threat response. The Baron could’ve snapped his neck, and Tarvek would’ve never known until those hands wrapped around his jaw and neck, and everything went dark.

“You need to sleep,” Gil says bluntly, and plants himself between the room’s door and Tarvek.

And the thing is, Tarvek _does_ , he knows he does, understands just how out of line his body has become. His extremities tingle when he flexes fingers and toes, trying to work the lost blood back into the numbed appendages. If he keeps working like this, he’s going to be of no use to anyone.

But he _can’t_ , he can’t—

Ultimately, if Gil had orders to kill Tarvek in his sleep, they would’ve triggered the last time they were in this room. That doesn’t mean some agent with the devil’s voice hasn’t gotten to Gil in the hours since Tarvek last saw him, but if Gil had new orders, it’s more likely that Tarvek would’ve found himself thrown out a window, or quietly taken aside and shot.

Tarvek closes his eyes, swallows past the thick bruising on his neck. If Gil tried to kill him tonight, would Tarvek’s unconscious body even know to fight back? Would Tarvek wake at all? Or would his body recognize the hands, and do nothing, having done nothing before? There’s no way of knowing, and the possibilities yawn before him, abyss open on either side.

“Fine,” Tarvek says, and swallows again, anything for some hint of moisture in his overtaxed body.

“Wh— really?” Gil starts, frown vanishing as his eyebrows make towards his hairline.

“I said fine,” Tarvek grates out, undoing the buttons of his shirt, unhooking his toolbelt and suspenders, draping them over an unoccupied peg on the wall.

When he turns back, Gil’s staring at his throat, the bruises revealed beneath his shirt. Tarvek wonders what Gil thinks of it, to see how he’s collared him, if Gil can recognize his own hands on the column of Tarvek’s neck.

Turning to the side, Tarvek strips his shirt the rest of the way off without care for his own modesty. He feels filthy, worn through as his clothing. Physical artifice won’t be enough to protect him from Gil’s prying eyes or the muted knowledge that lives in their blood. If anything, shedding layers, drawing attention to his injuries— Gil’s weakness has always been his concern; it won’t be hard to allow him to blame any inconsistency of Tarvek’s on his condition.

His bandages stand out against his skin, stark and foreign despite Tarvek’s paleness. Faint marks of dead black and clotting red already spot the new dressing, the gauze pad that guards the injury only enough to hide it. Tarvek can feel Gil’s awareness of him even without looking, vaguely remembers that the first person to try and close the hole inside him had been Gil.

“Do you have any other clean shirts?” Tarvek asks him.

“Uh,” Gil starts, turning to the little crate dresser across from the cot. “Um, yes, hold on. I don’t think they’re going to fit you any better than that one did, though.”

Tarvek sighs through his nose, affecting a wearied irritation he can’t quite summon the energy to feel. “It’ll do,” he says, and takes the clean undershirt Gil holds out to him, making sure their fingers don’t brush. He throws it on over his own unwashed skin with a grimace as the motion pulls at his bandages.

“Where have you been all day?” Gil asks him, throwing his own coat over the back of the room’s desk chair, the same as the type that used to fill the schoolrooms.

“I told you,” Tarvek says tiredly. “Chasing a lead. Well,” he amends, acknowledging Gil’s clear skepticism, “actually it was more like several leads; there’s no point in rampaging around like a clank in a city square. If I don’t do this subtly, whoever sent that assassin is going to just going to go to ground again.”

“You’d think they’d just do that anyway, seeing as the first strike failed,” Gil remarks.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tarvek says. “You’ve been running an empire— you _have_ to be smarter than that, if you’re still alive. The first strike is preliminary; the second is for refinement. Then you _wait_ , until everyone else has forgotten.”

“You should sleep,” Gil tells him. “You’re not even _pretending_ not to be horrible.”

“I have things to do,” Tarvek replies, elbowing Gil out of the way to reach the crate dresser. “Like, say, _preventing another assassination attempt_.”

“I do have a staff, you know,” Gil says.

“Oh really?” Tarvek drawls, pulling a soft pair of brown pants out of the drawer. “I wouldn’t have guessed. It’s not like I was the one who reminded you, or anything.”

Gil closes the drawer after him. “You know, after all that talk about delegating, you’d think that, I don’t know, maybe you would’ve _learned_ something from it—”

“None of them are fast enough!” Tarvek snaps at him, and feels shame roll through him like a tide, to say anything half so transparent, hardly even a lie.

Silence falls again, just as tense and awful as before. If Gil keeps treating him with kid gloves like this, Tarvek is going to claw his way out of his own skin, whether such a level of concern is useful to Tarvek’s goals or not.

“You really _do_ need to sleep,” Gil points out, and Tarvek _does_ but he’s running out of time— has been out of time, literally, for years.

“Or what?” Tarvek hisses. “You’re going to make me? Knock me out? Do it by force because it’s _easy?”_

“No,” Gil says. “I figured I’d just take a page out of your book; I won’t have to _make_ you do anything,” he continues. “You’re just going to lie down, and do it.”

“And why would that be?” Tarvek asks, folding his arms over his injured chest, carefully trying to work some feeling back into his fingers.

“Well, if I leave, you’re just going to disappear and not sleep again,” Gil points out. “But if I stay here— you want to know that I’ll be safe,” he says, smug as you please, and Tarvek— he’s not sure how to lie about that. If he even can, anymore.

 _Fuck you_ , he thinks clearly, but he sits down on the bed, unlaces his boots, changes into the new pants and shirt. Tarvek puts his glasses on the crate dresser and pulls the pants on, still feeling disgusting under the clean, ill-fitting clothes.

Tarvek seethes, and Gil sits in front of the door, apparently intending just to _watch him_ , the observation finally feeling invasive, unwanted, making Tarvek _itch_ at the claustrophobia of it and the enclosure of the room.

“Well, then?” Gil prods him. “If you really want to have a staring contest about this, I’m more than happy to watch you lose.”

Tarvek grinds his teeth, but lies down. There’s an art to picking one’s battles, and Gil had him pinned before this one even started.

* * *

Tarvek knows this place. Stone weighs down with all the inevitable force of legacy, and mantles on Tarvek’s shoulders, cold, familiar, keeping everything in. The shadows are deep, and ancient, stretching far under the earth and out through the mountain, past the lightning that keeps the moat and the heat alive. All Tarvek has is the candle in his hand, melting smaller every day, smearing everything he touches with ash and with wax.

The door to the lab he shares with Anevka is closed, but light is visible underneath, pouring out from behind the crack. The heavy wood opens under his one clean hand, and when he sees what’s arrayed before him, he drops the candle from the other.

For a moment, he thinks it’s Anevka, back on the slab, some older family member standing above. Blood pools, the living iron scent far too familiar, enriched and deepened by the shadows that dip their hands in past every limpid source of light. Then, his sister turns around to face him, and the guttering candle illuminates the steel plating of her face, the fixed expression of the smile Tarvek had wanted to give her.

“ _You_ did this to me,” Anevka hisses, her voice crackling with static. Tarvek could never get it quite right; the best samples that he had to work with were of her screaming.

“I didn’t,” Tarvek protests. “It’s wasn’t me, _I wasn’t even here_!”

On the slab behind Anevka, is Agatha, mouth covered, arms and legs bound. She’s not afraid. Tarvek is.

 _”I was a spark!”_ Anevka wails. “Blood gave me the gift the first time; if I take you apart,” Anevka asks, advancing with the scalpel, “will yours bring it back?”

“I don’t know,” Tarvek tells her. “I _don’t know_ —”

“Fine,” Anevka snarls. “Then _she’ll_ do—”

Turning like a dancer, Anevka whirls back towards the slab. Agatha is still there, and she’s not afraid but—

The scalpel is no longer in his sister’s hand; Tarvek always was good at misdirection. It slides home between metal vertebrae, and he pulls it free, drives it home. Pulls it free, again, and the ichor on his hands is cold, thin lubricant for machines. His sister falls to the ground at his feet, and it’s easier from here, to tell himself that she was only metal, as if that made her less of a person.

“Are you alright?” Tarvek asks Agatha, cutting her free, removing the rag from her mouth. He pulls her close, presses his face into the side of her head. She smells like sunlight, and like living things.

She leans back, and smiles at him; Lucrezia’s smile. “No,” she tells him gently, and takes the hand that holds the scalpel, drags it across her uncollared throat.

When the door behind him kicks open, Tarvek is still standing there in shock. He turns away from the body, and sees Gil glaring at him, brows heavy, spine straight. Hope flares up in Tarvek like the candle he lost.

“Help me,” Tarvek implores him.

“Why would I help you?” The baron asks. “You’re a danger, to her and to me. Your whole family—”

 _“Help me,”_ Tarvek begs. Her body is cooling in his grip. Tarvek can’t fix her, with his hands this dirty. He won’t risk contamination; he can barely hold the wound closed. “You _love_ her, _please_ —”

“You did this,” Wulfenbach accuses him, the Baron and the baron. “You did this to her,” he says, “it’s your fault.”

“I didn’t touch her,” Tarvek says, the knife heavy in his hand. He could fight back, with this. He _should_ —

“You could’ve stopped it,” Wulfenbach points out, “and you didn’t.”

( _Fight!_ Tarvek’s body screams. _You have things to do, fight back, don’t die here, on your feet!_ )

“I know,” Tarvek says. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not enough,” Wulfenbach tells him, stepping forward, reaching out—

_(Live!)_

—And Tarvek closes his eyes, let’s the heaviness take him, shadows pulling him down. Hands close around his throat, and Tarvek breathes out, feels his body empty and the blade fall from his filthy hand.

* * *

“Hey, Sturmvoraus.” A rough voice, insistent, worried, familiar—

 _Fight!_ Tarvek’s instincts demand. _Don’t die here! Stay alive, fight—_

Tarvek is up on his feet in a shiver of movement, kicking up off the plane (bed) he’d been put (not restrained, sleeping) on in a single motion, not hampered by the bindings (poorly done; sheet? No, coat) that had been covering him. Using his momentum, Tarvek shoves the baron back with a quick strike to the chest, the blow hard enough that it likely would’ve broken any other assailant’s ribs. Tarvek’s training screams at him for the lost opportunity of surprise; Tarvek _has a knife in his hand_ , he should’ve just _stabbed him_ (but, no, the Baron is poison resistant)—

 _“You need to wake up,”_ the voice tells him, winded, still worried. Tarvek begins to register details through his vision’s fuzziness: palms out, open; collar undone; head tilted (neck vulnerable); silver choker—

Tarvek blinks. If his grandmother hadn’t beaten his training into him, Tarvek would’ve dropped his knife. And with his hands as cold and shaking as they are, it’s still a near thing; he _can’t_ fight Gil. Not here, not literally at the very heart of his empire.

Tarvek shudders, pulling a deep, shaking breath in through his nose. Sweat, fear, stale air. And under all that, Gil, like soap and clean wind and the bite of ferrous metal, his presence undeniable.

“You alright there?” Gil asks him.

“What do you think?” Tarvek snarls. His chest _aches_ , likely overuse of smoke techniques and Tweedle’s _damned parting gift_ making his taxed heart harder to calm.

“Ask a stupid question,” Gil grimaces, but doesn’t move, outlined in low light, the room’s one oil lamp.

“All your questions are stupid,” Tarvek grumbles, adrenaline still driving his heartrate, techniques doing nothing other than causing him more pain.

“Do you want to want to talk about it?” Gil asks, awkward, unsure, like it pains him to do so; trying anyway, regardless.

Tarvek takes another breath. Memory is brutal; Gil used to do this when they were children. Wake Tarvek up, try to get him to talk out his nightmares, even if Tarvek only ever lied about his fears to Gil, not wanting to burden him with Tarvek’s life. Only then, Gil used to hold him close and glare over Tarvek’s shoulder like his weakness was something Gil could _fight_ —

“I’d rather not, no,” Tarvek rasps, and with shaking hands puts the knife away, folding it back into a screwdriver, careful of the toxin on the blade.

“Alright,” Gil says. Slowly, his hands come down. But his neck stays tilted, bared, Agatha’s handiwork displayed clearly.

“You shouldn’t have woken me up,” Tarvek tells him, looking back at the little cot bed, the tangled mess he made of it. Gil covered Tarvek in his _own coat_ , god—

Gil snorts. “Like you were really going to use that. Can you even see the target with your glasses off?”

“Blow a gasket,” Tarvek says tiredly. “I don’t need depth perception to handle _you_.”

“You might need it to handle that knife, though,” Gil replies. “How long was that thing? Two inches? Three?”

“It’s not the length of the blade—”

“—It’s how you use it?” Gil interjects blandly.

“It’s the poison that covers it, actually,” Tarvek corrects him, sneering. “But I’m not surprised that _that’s_ where your mind goes. I’ve seen the statues of Agatha around the city— sources say the ones at the valley entrance are, against all odds, _worse_.”

Gil winces, slightly. Vulnerability, again, digging into Tarvek’s skin. “They do actually serve a purpose,” Gil defends himself. “They’re most of what’s keeping the thorns at bay.”

Tarvek scrubs his face with a hand, and it comes away with with salt, sweat. Humiliation sweeps through him; he’d hoped he’d grown out of crying in his sleep, but apparently not.

His glasses are on top of the crate dresser, and turning his back to Gil in order to pick them up is an effort of will. Tarvek’s skin crawls, even as the dream fades from horrifically vivid to merely frightening. Reality, even as broken as if feels, is still better, more grounding. Tarvek can feel them, here. Like someone walking around a small building, footsteps moving the floor. He hadn’t noticed that he couldn’t, in the dream, but the difference is staggering now that he’s paying attention. Tarvek takes advantage of what Gil can’t see, and presses a hand over his chest, palm pushing down on the stained bandages and gauze. It hurts, but the pain is real, and does not cut through the presences that live inside him, the undeniable warmth they give to whatever Tarvek has that passes for a soul.

Tarvek puts his glasses on, and everything comes into focus. He turns and there’s Gil, the bed, the metal door.

“It’s your turn to sleep,” Tarvek says.

“I’m fine,” Gil tells him, raising an eyebrow.

“Like hell. The last time you slept was yesterday.”

“I can go awhile without it,” Gil shrugs, and Tarvek suppresses the urge to snarl again, to be just as feral as he feels.

“And you didn’t sleep for _months_ before this. Don’t try to lie to me about it, I’m not stupid—” Tarvek runs a hand through his hair. “You can’t—”

Realization dawns, sick and awful when coupled as it is with the understanding of how to use it. All the bizarre gentleness, how close Gil keeps coming to reaching out, touching him— Gil was alone for two and a half years. Tarvek only lost Gil for bare _hours_ , in Mechanicsburg, and it doesn’t surprise him at all that he had trouble believing, when Gil pulled him free. It’s a wonder that Gil let Tarvek out of his sight to begin with.

“I won’t go anywhere,” Tarvek lies, and looks Gil right in the eye, doesn’t flinch from the worry he finds there.

“How do I know that?” Gil demands, not in accusation, but a real request for a real answer. Tarvek could tell him anything at all right now, any real, true thing, and Gil would probably listen.

“I’m not going anywhere without my shoes,” Tarvek suggests. “You can do whatever you want with them long as you don’t destroy them; if you’ve got them, I can’t exactly leave.”

Gil squints at him, and it’s— damn it, Tarvek’s used to suspicion, used to guilt, _it shouldn’t hurt_ —

“Gil,” Tarvek says, “trust me.”

* * *

Arthur gave Excalibur to Bedwyr for safekeeping. He was Camelot’s marshall and her master of arms, a title that Arthur bestowed with a smile, that made rude seneschal Cai snicker helplessly every time he heard it said. Who else could have been entrusted with the great blade’s disposal? Who else would have been fit to lay Arthur’s sword to rest?

It’s a question with no answer; no one else survived Camlan. It was Bedwyr’s greatest talent, at the beginning and the end, to live through death and bear it with him.

Destiny never asked if that was how he wanted to be remembered. No stories ever ask, ever contemplate if the bodies of his friends were the burden he’d wanted to carry.

* * *

Gil sleeps like the dead. On his front, back exposed, Tarvek’s work boots pinned under his chest. His continued existence is desperately improbable, and Tarvek despairs for him, all the awful little ways in which Gil makes himself weak.

And if Tarvek is playing from behind, then fine; so is Gil. He took off his own boots after they already established that Tarvek can fit into his clothes within a reasonable if slightly uncomfortable margin. He kept Tarvek’s boots, but Gil didn’t even _think_ to worry about his own. All he did was kick them under the bed, and that just to keep them out of the way.

For a moment, Tarvek considers going barefoot. Nostalgia makes it an attractive concept, but he knows it won’t be the city he feels beneath his feet, just the cold. According to his watch, Tarvek only managed to get two hours, at most, before Gil woke him, and even with the third hour of rest he’s gotten waiting to be sure that Gil had fallen asleep, that’s only helped so much. Tarvek’s feet are, for the most part, frighteningly numb. If he hurt himself on anything in the halls, Tarvek doubts he’d even notice it until the damage impaired his ability to walk badly enough that his balance was disturbed.

Also, he’d be cold. Just because Tarvek can’t quite feel his feet past the pins-and-needles sensation of poor bloodflow doesn’t mean that he has to settle for additional discomfort.

Tarvek steps into Gil’s shoes. Let it be Gil who sleeps, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of this chapter, we're officially into the back half of this fic. And as of last week in comics, we're _very_ jossed in terms of actual canon, with both premises having been dispelled (Agatha collaring Gil, and Gil rescuing Tarvek in the circumstances described in this series).
> 
> Content Warnings for chapter 4 include: Blood and Gore - this is a general warning for the chapter seeing as a lot of people get hurt or die; Child Abuse - Specifically neglect, emotional abuse, mind control, and murder; Emotional Manipulation - This one probably falls back under domestic abuse in that Tarvek purposefully lies to Gil and abuses his trust, as well as generally playing with his emotions in order to get what he wants. Gil also manipulates Tarvek with (probably) the same motives.
> 
> Other warnings apply specifically to Tarvek's nightmare sequence as follows: Fratricide - Tarvek kills his sister; Domestic Abuse - Agatha (arguably under her mother's control) kills herself using Tarvek's hand, and then Tarvek lets Gil (possibly under his father's control) kill him in reprisal; Suicide - as stated above Agatha(?) kills herself.


	5. The Blood of the Witch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Act Two. The fifth task.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See the end for content warning.

What does one do when they can’t win a game the way it is played? It’s a decent philosophical question, for most people. It’s an object lesson for smoke knights, or it was when Tarvek was being trained.

The minute Gil wakes up, Tarvek’s done. He’s painfully aware of that. The short timeframe he’s been working under has been frighteningly reduced thanks to Gil’s separation anxiety. If Tarvek had stayed there, he would’ve never gotten away, and the Baron— the Other—

This isn’t a game, but the principles are the same. Much like smoke knight training, the win condition here is more of a series of favorable terms rather than a single point, but the chiefest concerns involve one’s own survival, and that of the principal. If Tarvek continues with his plan as it’s stood, playing the good little courier and trying not to stir up suspicion—

What does _Tarvek_ do, when the game is unwinnable as played? The obvious answer is to cheat. Scandalously. But this isn’t a game. And if it is, it’s a game that Tarvek’s playing from so far behind, he might as well have had both numb hands removed at the wrists.

Tarvek is used to not being able to win. He’s used to his opponents being the people who, supposedly, care. Used to relying on his own wits and the grace of those above him to keep himself alive. Sometimes, cheating is not enough. _Hope_ — he won’t rely on that. It’s not enough.

Tarvek’s spark crackles inside him, edged and multifaceted like a utility knife. It unfolds, and slices neatly; the only winning move is not to play.

* * *

“You’ve been playing me,” Tarvek says.

Cumali startles at the sound of his voice, wide eyes snapping to where Tarvek sits behind his desk. The lieutenant tries not to show it, but it’s clear enough in the way his fingers clench on the edge of the door as he walks through, fine lines appearing on his forehead and at the corner of his eyes. Cumali seems a bit terrified, adrenaline shaking him out of early morning lethargy. Most likely, he’s thinking of calling for help.

That would be unwise, but Tarvek can’t quite blame the man for being unreasonable; Tarvek is in his office before sunrise, after all. He can excuse Cumali for the lapse in judgement. It’s not everyday one wakes up to find someone else sitting in their fortress, right in the heart of their power.

Cumali must’ve thought he was safe.

“It’s a bit early for all this, don’t you think?” Cumali asks him. His voice barely wavers at all, but Tarvek can still hear it, just like he can see Cumali reaching for something in his pocket, the one still blocked behind the door.

“I wouldn’t try anything, if I were you,” Tarvek tells him. “Whatever it is you’ve got in your hand, I want to hear you drop it.”

“Or what?” Cumali asks, inching further behind the door.

“I’m not going to monologue for you,” Tarvek says. “You’re an imaginative man, lieutenant; I’m sure you can think of something suitably unpleasant. And do come out from behind the door, please. Pull up a chair. We’re going to have a chat.”

* * *

Tarvek had been so afraid, when he first met Agatha. He can’t— he won’t say he’d loved her, then. But even before he knew who she was Tarvek had been afraid, sick at heart with the things he was too cowardly to stop. Agatha was so brilliant, and so good, and it had barely been a year since his sister’s dying light unveiled Lucrezia’s engine. Tarvek and Agatha had only just met; he hadn’t loved her, then, he couldn’t have allowed himself to. But that hadn’t meant he’d wanted her to die.

It had been horrifying, to watch Lucrezia use Agatha like a puppet— _her own child_ , with not a shred of decency or respect. Tarvek has lived so much of his life impotent and terrified, navigating in defined spaces. And he’d— he meant, what Lucrezia overheard. Tarvek would’ve done whatever he could have done to have gotten Agatha free. But Tarvek had wanted to live, too, wanted it badly enough to lay his sister’s ghost to rest.

Now—

Tarvek has identified the flaws in his past thinking. He would’ve done whatever he could have, before. Now, he’s willing to do whatever it will take.

* * *

Tarvek will give credit where credit is due; Lieutenant Cumali is an admirably fast draw, and a very accurate shot. If Tarvek weren’t already on guard, the lieutenant would’ve gotten him right in the chest. As it is, the bullet slices past Tarvek’s right arm with a flash of pain and a remarkably loud noise as he blinks forward into Cumali’s reach, vaulting the desk and chair between them.

“I really do respect what you do here,” Tarvek tells him, twisting the lieutenant’s wrists over his head, causing the gun to drop to the floor with a clang. “It’s not an easy job, and you’re very often underestimated, a mistake that I now find I’ve made _twice_ , which is a higher margin of error than I usually allow myself.”

“And this is you _not_ monologuing?” Cumali grits out between his teeth, hissing against the pain of all his weight coming to rest in his shoulders as Tarvek lifts him off the ground by his wrists.

“If two people are talking, it doesn’t count as a monologue, now does it?” Tarvek says. The graze in his arm burns, protesting Cumali’s weight. It’s a superficial wound, Tarvek’s reasonably sure about that despite the amount of blood that’s starting to pour from it, but the injury still hurts, is still _another_ thing that Tarvek has to take care of and pay attention to.

“This is more of an explanation,” Tarvek says, hoisting the lieutenant a little higher off the ground. “A courtesy. And possibly, a chance for you to explain _your_ plans. Because I don’t understand; you’re a very good logistician, Lieutenant Cumali. I didn’t even see the seams on this little scheme of yours. Not at first. What sort of messaging system have you been using? Telegraph? Pneumatics?”

“A mix of both,” Cumali hisses, twisting his weight as best he can on his shoulders as his feet leave the ground, trying to find the leverage to kick. “Word of mouth, mostly.”

Tarvek nods sympathetically. “That must’ve been hard to orchestrate, or it would’ve been if you were less competent. But therein lies the problem, lieutenant; by your own admission, you’re a logistician, not a spy. You had to know that you were going to get caught.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cumali declares. “Enough people knew about the plan that if I died or disappeared, there would be consequences for you. And you’d be exposed; a clear threat.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that _I’m_ the one you should be worried about,” Tarvek corrects him, voice crackling around the edges. “As soon as you figured out who I was, you had to have known just how little power I have over anyone aboard, beyond the threat of violence. What I want to know,” he continues, “is what you thought you were going to do if _the baron_ found out about this.”

* * *

All the legends that Tarvek knows on the subject inevitably go like this: Bedwyr survives.

Tarvek never particularly _liked_ Bedwyr’s stories, because frankly, there weren’t that many of them. Bedwyr was a prop. Not that good a magician, and not that strong of a spark, Bedwyr couldn’t even manage to be a knight correctly and die for his king, as he outlived each one he served.

He existed in the narrative to take up space, and to be the one that brought the news home of ruin. It isn’t a tragedy if no one sees it, if there’s no one around to remember the loss. Bedwyr watched his country shatter twice, and the stories still won’t speak to how he died. It wasn’t nearly as important as all the times he failed to.

* * *

“I brought tea,” Tarvek says. “Remarkably toxin free.”

“My hands are a bit—” Cumali pulls his arms up a little, making the chair jerk when the line tethering his wrists to the armrests draws short.

“My apologies,” Tarvek says. “I’d quite forgotten.”

And— he really _had_. It was only a minute ago that Tarvek had picked up the lieutenant’s gun and waved him over to the chair, and the reality of that action had just slipped out of his mind. The gun is holstered on Tarvek’s toolbelt.

His spark writhes in him, and he frowns, trying to pull his way back towards the surface. Tarvek’s never tried to balance the spark and smoke techniques like this before. Not with this much physical stress to push them to the limits. Gil’s exhaustion isn’t the only clock he’s fighting, and Tarvek’s getting sloppy as his body tries to make its demands known.

“Where did you even _get_ that?” Cumali asks him.

“Oh,” Tarvek says, looking back down at the thermos. “The mess hall, the one next to this office, actually. They’re very kind. People like Bedwyr; he’s so helpful.”

“Okay,” Cumali says slowly, “but _why_?”

“I told them I wanted to do you a favor,” Tarvek says, “in return for all the help you’ve given me. With cutting corners, and all that. You’re very well liked by your staff, you know. They respect you.”

Tarvek pauses, and starts to unscrew the lid of the thermos. “Jacob Axmaker told me this was your favorite,” he remarks. “He’s worried about your health.” Every motion jars his arm, but the pain is easy enough to work through, in comparison.

Cumali remains silent while Tarvek takes a drink. It’s a white tea; thin and fragrant, and it barely cuts through the thick discomfort that’s taken up residence in Tarvek’s dehydrated mouth and throat. It hurts, a little, going down.

Cumali’s eyes burn into him, trying to figure Tarvek out, probably, or wriggle free. The second isn’t going to work for him, and the first would go better if _Tarvek_ knew what he was doing.

“Honestly,” Tarvek says, “I’m trying to be polite about all of this.”

“By tying me to a chair at gunpoint,” Cumali says dryly.

“You _shot_ me,” Tarvek points out, more than a bit scandalized.

“Like I said; people tend to shoot at you, when you’re a spy.”

“Mostly, you just get poisoned,” Tarvek corrects him, before adding; “though I have been shot before. Guns are so loud, and gauche. Not nearly as useful for plausible deniability.”

Across the table, Cumali looks at him strangely, brown eyes tracking over the metal thermos, the still-bleeding injury in Tarvek’s arm. “So you’ve got experience, at this sort of thing,” he says.

“Implying that if I do you somehow _don’t_ is a bit rich coming from someone who had me running all over the ship for a nearly a full day,” Tarvek says. “I doubt that you even told half the people I met exactly what they were helping with, or why. A conspiracy that large becomes quickly unmanageable. But then again, you are a _very_ good logistician.”

“You flatter me,” Cumali drawls.

“No, I want _answers_ ,” Tarvek tells him, sharp points hanging from his words. “If flattery is going to yield them for me, I’ll take it. I’ve figured out your plan, for the most part: was I _safe_ , was I someone who could be trusted. Get the word of mouth on how I acted when I was trying to be _helpful_. See if I was smart enough to figure it out, see what I would do when I did. A lot of the details don’t matter anymore; who you told, who you didn’t tell. You’ve gotten your answers, by now. What I want to know is why you didn’t tell _the baron_.”

“What makes you think we didn’t tell him?” Cumali says. Or rather, he bluffs.

Gil wasn’t told about this plan. Tarvek _knows that_. If Gil knew that Tarvek was trying to get to Mechanicsburg, it wouldn’t have been hard for Gil to understand _why_. Tarvek wasn’t the only thing Gil was looking for in the city, and Gil’s father wasn’t the only other item on the list. Before Gil can free the Baron, he has to find a way to reverse the effects of Lucrezia’s wasps. Tarvek and the wasp eaters were going to have been Gil’s best bet, on that front. If, of course, that’s even the plan, and Gil isn’t acting under orders to destroy the wasp eaters and free his father as Lucrezia’s best chess piece. Either way, Gil would’ve had him seized for treason, as if Tarvek actually _belongs_ to this self-deconstructing behemoth of an illegitimate state.

Tarvek knows he’s having trouble thinking straight, lately, exhaustion and illness and the nature of his own spark driving him to the edge of his endurance, but he’s still good at this. Tarvek’s been neck deep in conspiracy since he could _talk_ , and there are some skills you learn for survival, paranoia developed like an eye looking out from the wrong side of your skull.

Even without all that, Tarvek knows _Gil_. Tarvek can _hear him_ (barely now, but still nonetheless) in a way that has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with the space inside of Tarvek that Gil and Agatha carved out to fit themselves inside. Tarvek has known for awhile, what Gil’s suspicion feels like. He knew, too, what it felt like when Gil _trusted_ him all those years ago. Tarvek knows them both again, now, a deeper and more painful understanding than he’d ever suspected possible, even under the muffling effect of whatever’s been done to Gil.

Right now, Gil’s asleep. But under that—

“I know,” Tarvek says shortly. “You were keeping this from him. But why?”

“The baron doesn’t need to know about every person we’re vetting,” Cumali says. “It’d be inefficient.”

Tarvek frowns. “I’d buy that if I was actually Bedwyr, and not a displaced prince whose home was, by my reckoning, recently razed to the ground by this empire.”

“That town was crawling with wasps,” Cumali snarls at him, face twisting with a sudden rage. “Nearly the _entire population_ of Balan’s Gap was infected, not to mention the castle staff in Sturmhalten! There were _multiple engines_ under the town, and your family _knew_. You _put them there._ There was nothing left for those people. The old Baron was right to burn that place down.”

“And would you have told _him_ that I was caught trying to escape Imperial custody?” Tarvek presses him.

Cumali’s silence speaks for him.

“Yeah,” Tarvek says heavily, “I thought so.”

* * *

One of the best things about Paris was the opera. Or, rather:

The best thing about Paris was being free. Every other aspect Tarvek came to love about the city descended from that first reality. Tarvek wasn’t so naive as to think there was nothing sinister in Paris; Voltaire watched everything like a blade waiting to find an unprotected neck, but even in the panopticon people were _free_. There was no law, in Paris, except for what the Master made, and even then his punishment was usually imprisonment, execution and repurposing of parts reserved for what Voltaire considered to be the most egregious crimes. There were no pale-eyed women in Paris to pull things apart; the young women getting dragged into the sewers were someone else’s problem, at least until Tarvek had become reacquainted with Gil and introduced to his debauched brand heroics.

It had been a revelation for Tarvek, just breathing in Paris. There was _art_ , there was _noise_ , there was motion and endless light. Paris contained more printing houses than Tarvek could bother to count, ran the entire _industry_ of fashion in the west, and was the center of free trade and commercialism, operating on a scale that made Sturhalten and Balan’s Gap look as provincial as it was. Best of all there was _opera_ , with multiple theaters all competing for the public’s love and coin, as opposed to one theater with the mounted artillery array accounting for the most spectacular feature of the royal box.

Before he had her sent to Mechanicsburg, Violetta used to go to the opera with Tarvek. Not necessarily by any choice of her own, but rather as part of the job description she’d been born with. Which, usually, resulted in Tarvek watching the opera in rapture, and his little cousin watching the theater from the shadows of the private box, bored to tears.

“The Don has him at sword point,” Violetta asked him once during the third act confrontation of _La Contrapasso_. “Why not just kill him?”

‘Honor,’ was one reason, and ‘dignity,’ was another, but mostly:

“Because that’s how the song goes,” Tarvek told her. “It wouldn’t be right, otherwise.”

“Seems stupid,” Violetta pointed out. “Dangerous, too. On both of their parts. The baritone’s a thief; he could get that sword if he wanted it bad enough.” 

Tarvek remained fixed on the stage, the light, the sound, the utter betrayal. “Maybe he just needs to tell someone,” he said. “Maybe he thinks he can change.”

“The hero, or the villain?” Violetta asked him.

“Both of them,” Tarvek said. “Don Basso wants Modesto to have never betrayed him to gain his magic. Modesto still thinks of the Don as his brother. They’re both hoping that this ends with Basso dropping the sword. But he won’t do it,” Tarvek continued as the Don crossed the stage, railing tearfully at Modesto. “It wouldn’t be a good tragedy if they walked away as friends.”

“Why put on a tragedy at all, if it’s going to be so stupid?” Violetta needled him, frowning at the scene.

“Don’t you read the papers?” Tarvek asked her idly. “It’s the tragedies that sell.”

Below, Modesto swallowed the key to all his ill-gotten holdings, and looked at the Don as he interjected with his last note. Shock flew over Don Basso’s face, a decent showing from an actor who’d otherwise proved to be prone to melodrama and overacting. It was a good contrast to Modesto, on his knees, wrists tied, smiling up at the prince of Milan like they were children still, and not grown men at the end of their personal war.

“There he goes,” Tarvek remarked, and watched as the Don’s blade cut through the commoner’s throat, right through the armor of his magic, silver voice.

“Good effect,” Violetta said begrudgingly, as the thief’s head fell to the ground, the devil’s key falling out of the hole at the bottom of his neck.

On the stage, Don Basso was crying, and Tarvek watched as he knelt for the brass key by his brother’s body, weeping as the violins soared.

“How do they do that, you think?” Violetta asked him. “Get the head to come off when he was singing just a minute ago?”

“A trapdoor, most likely,” Tarvek murmured. “It’s all smoke and mirrors, anyway.”

* * *

“You could’ve gone along with it,” Cumali says quietly.

“No,” Tarvek shakes his head, and regrets the motion almost immediately, nearly able to feel his brain move inside the fragile casing of his skull.

“Why not?” Cumali asks him. “People _liked you_ , even the ones who knew who you were. It wasn’t all fake—”

“I’m not going to make myself _safe_ for you,” Tarvek sneers. “I don’t belong to the baron, I’m not _the property of this empire_. The Baron stole land and toppled governments; the only thing different between you and the old Heterodynes is that your city doesn’t _talk._ You’ve taken what you wanted, and predicated it all on some grand peacekeeping agenda, as if the people on the ground could see any difference between regimes save the shadow of the fleet above their homes.”

“Because collaboration with the Other is _so_ much better,” Cumali shoots back. “You royals don’t even have to notice the difference between mind control and royal edict, except that one probably goes a bit smoother, doesn’t it? Everyone just _falls in line_ if you take their choices from them.”

“And how is that any better than holding a gun to someone’s head?!” Tarvek shouts. “Is it easier to justify; _‘oh, at least they had a choice,’_ when the choice was to submit or get _shot_?”

Pain lances through Tarvek’s chest at the outburst. His bicep throbs, and air drags through his throat like sharded glass. Tarvek takes a breath, and then another, pressing his right hand to his sternum, the throb of weakness clear beside the bond, his upper right arm soaked and red. In his other hand, the thermos creaks, the thin metal warping under his insensate fingers. Gingerly, Tarvek places it on the desk.

“You said it was a matter of faith,” Tarvek remarks, doing his best to collect himself. “But if that were true, you’ve done a remarkably poor job of showing any.”

“Faith?” Cumali asks, seemingly thrown by the non-sequitur.

“If you trusted your baron, none of this plan makes any sense,” Tarvek says. “If you thought I was dangerous enough that I had to be vetted, but safe enough that you didn’t shoot me once you suspected I was trying to escape his custody, why not tell him?”

“I’m a lieutenant,” Cumali says flatly.

“He’d listen to you,” Tarvek points out. “He’d listen to anyone who brought a real concern.”

Wary, straining, Cumali says nothing.

Tarvek bridges his hands together, leans forward, planting his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his fingers. Watches the lieutenant stay very, very still. “So you don’t trust him,” Tarvek surmises. “Not really. Not with his own safety.”

“You were nearly _dead_ when they brought you onto the ship,” Cumali says, low, the way all the best cautionary tales were told. “I was there on on the docks; he had to _carry you_ into the hospital, snapped at anyone who tried to ease the burden from him.”

“So you underestimated _me_ , too, not just him,” Tarvek says. “Careless of you.”

“I didn’t,” Cumali tells him, mouth a thin line in a narrow face. “I know you’re dangerous. Normal people stop moving when they get shot, and don’t do things like _dodge bullets_ to begin with. There were on-sight orders for your family, after the siege. I don’t trust you, and the baron doesn’t think straight when you’re involved. But there’s a bit of a tradition, around here; something from the old days that I know he’d approve of: everyone gets one chance,” the lieutenant tells him, whole bearing heavy with iron. “One.”

* * *

There was another dream Tarvek used to have, when he and Gil were children. It was silly, and it hurt, and it was something Tarvek used to hold onto in the mornings when he woke up on the floor of Gil’s dorm room, or leaning on his shoulder in the ductwork.

It made less sense than the nightmare about falling. It was older than that one, too. And it went like this:

Gilgamesh Holzfäller had never had a family, and Tarvek Sturmvoraus never liked his very much. And they were sad and alone and they didn’t have to be, but it was going to take Tarvek being braver than he’d ever been in his life.

The dream was not about a crown, or a sword. It wasn’t about owning. None of the details mattered past these three: they were happy. They were together. They were safe. And as long as Tarvek kept his eyes closed in the morning, that all went on forever, the feeling heavy and warm inside him.

* * *

Standing takes more effort than Tarvek thought it would. Everything’s been harder than he thought it was going to be. This had started as a simple plan. Easy extraction. Two hour maximum. Tarvek knows the exact moment that things went sideways on him. He knows how he got here. It shouldn’t have taken him nearly twenty hours to end up back in this office.

“What’s your exit strategy, on this one?” Cumali asks him as Tarvek unhooks his suspenders and toolbelt.

“That was remarkably transparent of you,” Tarvek points out. After his belt, he removes his borrowed shirt, undoing buttons, shrugging the already stained and torn garment with care for his injuries.

“You said this was a dialogue,” Cumali says, and Tarvek can feel the eyes tracking over his stained bandages, his arm, his neck. “So far you’ve just hammed your way through the most ass-backwards interrogation I’ve ever been a part of.”

“You interrogate a lot of people, lieutenant?” Tarvek asks, pulling a piece of scrap fabric from his toolbelt. 

“Not many,” Cumali hedges.

“I learned, recently, that the easiest way to get someone to reveal things is to just let them talk,” Tarvek says. “Get them angry. Let them yell a little bit. They’ll open right up.”

“Good for you,” Cumali says, pressing forward in his chair, that same earnest urgency still in every word. “What’s your exit strategy?” he repeats. “You have to know this isn’t ending well for you. This, right here? You had your shot and you wasted it. How the hell are you getting out?”

“I’d make a piss poor spy if I just told you how I was getting off this airship,” Tarvek says, more than a little affronted.

Cumali gives him the barest trace of a smile, entirely sardonic as he tugs the rope on his wrists again. “I’m a little stuck here,” he says. “You can keep the dialogue up, if you want. It’s not like I’d be able to trip any sort of alarm.”

“Not after I disabled the panic button under your desk, no,” Tarvek agrees, just to watch the lieutenant’s eyes widen that much farther. “I took out the pneumatics and the emergency telegraph, too. You’d be surprised, the sort of things you can do with wiring like that, when you really need it. Short range hailing, mimicking signals. If you’re smart enough,” he says, spark creeping a bit heavier into the bite of his consonants, “a lot of doors open. It helps if you can build a better lockpick.”

With a careful eye, Tarvek looks down at the gunshot wound Cumali gave him only minutes ago. Tarvek knows enough medicine to know that he was very, very lucky that the lieutenant sees more action at his desk than on the frontlines. If Cumali’s aim had been any better, if he’d compensated for the fact that Tarvek was already moving by the time the gun went off— the lieutenant had been aiming for the center of mass. Instead of killing him outright, he hit Tarvek on the outside of his right bicep, the round tearing through a not insignificant portion of the meat there, which explains why the pain is less than Tarvek was expecting, given that he got shot. There are less nerve endings on the inside of one’s arm, than the outer layer. If Cumali had grazed him, ironically, it would’ve felt worse.

Tarvek squints at the injury critically, ignoring the panicked voice in the back of his head; he doesn’t have time to stop and rest now, and he certainly doesn’t have the time to stand around and bleed out. Poking at the injury as carefully as he can, Tarvek can’t feel anything lodged in there, and the wound seems consistent with a through-and-through. On the one hand, Tarvek won’t have to go looking for a bullet, and he doesn’t seem to have shattered any bones. On the other hand, there’s a hole in his right bicep.

“I’m going to need your shirt, lieutenant,” Tarvek remarks, pulling the jar of medical sealant out of his toolbelt, placing it carefully on the desk.

“You’re going to have to untie my wrists, for that,” Cumali says.

“Mm,” Tarvek hums. “Or I could put an end to your stalling and just knock you out.”

“Or— what?” Cumali startles.

“If you didn’t want me to arm myself, you should’ve kept better track of where exactly it was that people sent me,” Tarvek tells him, and opens another pouch on his belt.

Cumali tries jerking the chair to the side as Tarvek throws a vial at the lieutenant’s feet, holding the scrap fabric up to his nose and mouth. The glass container smashes on the ground, and green fumes quickly waft up, diffusing in the air as Cumali’s eyes roll back in his head, the chair Tarvek tied him to crashing to the metal deck.

* * *

Here’s the other half of the question Tarvek’s had rattling around in his brain since he woke up: how do you outsmart someone who’s a part of you?

Tarvek and Gil can’t read each other’s minds; they hadn’t been able to do that even when the _Si Vales Valeo_ was still plugged physically into their chests. And even though what they share with Agatha now is a thin shadow of what they used to have, in terms of sheer information transmitted, it’s still _valuable_ , still a _good predictive tool._

Even now, Tarvek is aware of Agatha; anger, discovery, joy. She shines like a beacon, so far away that Tarvek can barely hear her at all, but she’s still _present_ , still fighting and alive, alive, _alive_.

Gil, on the other hand— something’s _wrong_. Not as bad as it had been before the bomb went off; this isn’t the same crippling separation, like Gil had stayed behind and _died_ for them— but something’s wrong. Gil is in the same _city_ as Tarvek, and still Tarvek can barely hear him. He knows that Gil’s sleeping. Tarvek knows— he can sync his breathing to the way that Gil breathes. But Tarvek hadn’t known that Gil was afraid.

It makes sense to think that Agatha would’ve done her best to replicate the effects of her own locket, in the working of Gil’s silver choker. And without being able to take it off for long periods of time, if at all, Tarvek understands that the gift she gave to Gil wouldn’t produce the same effects in their connection that the protection would be different even by virtue of no two spark productions being exactly alike, if nothing else.

But it’s still— Tarvek doesn’t _know_ that that’s the cause of the problem, and out of wariness, he can only assume that something is wrong, and that Gil has a better connection to Tarvek than the other way around. This is Gil’s territory, on top of everything else, and Tarvek understands the degree to which he’s been trespassing. Gil has _every advantage_ on Tarvek right now, except time.

Tarvek only has the resources he’s carrying; a belt full of miscellanea, a fugue he’s desperately trying to keep a throttle on, and a body that’s rapidly failing him. Every road he can visualize, every path he maps out, they all end in one of four ways: with Tarvek captured, dead, captured and awaiting death, or wasped, a fate which is worse than both capture and death. Cumali was right; there isn’t a plan where this ends well for Tarvek.

Which is why it’s a good thing that Tarvek threw the plan out the window an hour ago, and decided to borrow an old standby of Gil’s pointless heroics. Namely, in that there is no plan. Tarvek has goals. Everything else, in comparison, has been rendered irrelevant.

* * *

Tarvek’s bent over at the waist, sitting on the floor of a cargo hold in a delivery blimp when someone else walks in. His eyes are pressed into his forearms, forearms resting on his knee, and he can feel the floor vibrating with every heavy step. His right arm hurts, the injury and the aid higher up than the place his head is resting, bicep throbbing in time with his heart.

Blearily, Tarvek looks up; a pair of boots, overalls tucked in. Beyond that, the towering form of Shoshannah Summerfield, as much as statue as the ones she helped to build.

“Hey, Bedwyr,” Summerfield greets him cheerfully, settling down next to him. “I didn’t know you were going to be catching this ride out.”

“I didn’t either,” Tarvek tells her. “Things wound up moving a little faster than I thought they would. That— it happens like that a lot,” he admits.

It was either this ride, or the other six dawn departures that were going to be setting down anywhere near Mechanicsburg in the next hour. Tarvek still made sure he was seen getting onto all of the others, calling in favors in Bedwyr’s name and using the equipment he salvaged from Cumali’s office to seed reports of Bedwyr’s departures before settling on this one. It was stupid of him to think that no one would come this far back into the cargo hold. The city doesn’t run on normal, human schedules, and never has.

“Glad I caught you, then,” Summerfield tells him. “I picked up the campaign pins you were looking for last night, out of the ninth engineworks.”

“Rivka Harrison’s engineworks?” Tarvek asks, turning a little out of his bent position, looking up into Summerfield’s grin.

“Same one,” she confirms. “She wanted to know who wanted pins that didn’t already have ‘em, so I told her your story.”

Turning away from him slightly, Summerfield reaches into a pocket in her overalls, on the side of her body that Tarvek can’t see. If she knows— if Tarvek is going to get attacked here, it will be the sloppiest assassination attempt he’s ever been a part of. He tenses anyway, spark hungry in his body.

“Here,” Summerfield says, looking back to him, two lumps of iron in the palm of her hand, and not a weapon. “She had a message for you, too.”

“Packages, messages; isn’t this all supposed to be my job?” Tarvek asks her.

“Heh,” Summerfield chuckles. “I guess, yeah. Don’t mind doing it for a second, though; I agree with what she had to say.”

Carefully, Summerfield tips the pins into the hand Tarvek holds out. The iron is heavy, for such small tokens. The dim light of the hold plays off the new metal, so recently made that Tarvek can nearly feel the heat from the engineworks radiating off them. Tarvek closes his fist, and runs a thumb over the curve of the gear in the Sturmhalten pin, down the length of the sword.

“She wanted me to say she’s offering you a job,” Summerfield says after a moment, catching Tarvek’s attention again. “Well,” she adds, “more like a transfer.”

“What do you mean?” Tarvek asks.

“I mean, or, well, the corporal means—” Summerfield shakes her head, sighing. “You wanted to go home, right?” She asks him.

Not trusting his voice, Tarvek nods.

“Well,” Summerfield says, “being stationed on the castle is going to put you a hell of a lot closer. And I don’t know _who_ you bribed to overlook your spark this long, even after the collapse, but people aren’t going to ignore it much longer. You’re going to end up in a workshop, somewhere,” she says gently. “You might as well pick which one, and where, while you can.”

“So, she’s offering me the best of bad options?” Tarvek asked, bite creeping back into his voice. “If I’m going to get chained to a desk, might as well have the jailer be someone I know?”

“Don’t get it backwards,” Summerfield chides him. She leans against the wall, tilting her head back until her skull taps the metal. “It’s not just a job, and I’d like to think things haven’t been so bad for the minor sparks since the old Baron fell. She’s offering you a way out, BB. The corporal said that they remember their own, at the heart of things.”

“Did—” Tarvek blinks, squinting into the shadows the overhead lights paint on Summerfield’s face. “Did you just call me _BB_?”

Summerfield laughs at him, full and rich. “Of course that’s what you’re getting hung up on. Your name’s a mouthful, you know that, right?”

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the courtesy to at least _try_ to use it,” he grumbles.

“I did try,” Summerfield points out. “And I kept screwing up, so I’m just gonna stop, at this point. It’s probably for the best.”

Tarvek puts his chin on his folded arms, and stares at the wall of crates stacked before him. According to the ship manifest, it’s masonry, wiring; they’re extending the tunnels, later today. Gil’s been digging far and deep, and the network through Mechanicsburg is beginning to sprawl.

Time is an arbitrary thing, Tarvek has discovered. All his life he’s been waiting, planning. Moving slowly and carefully as he’s dared to, every plan destroyed by the mere fact that Agatha lives and breathes, that the world is anything but a closed, static system. Time used to be the ally Tarvek most relied on, and now, it betrays him, again and again. He slept for two years, and now, sitting on the floor of the ship that carries him back to his old prison with all the rest of the more inanimate tools, all he can think of is that he wants to sleep for two years more.

* * *

The old stories make magicians of the spark. Maybe it’s close enough a comparison; enough people are still burned for witchcraft in the wastelands each year for it to count. People fear what they don’t understand; there were plenty who called for Bedwyr’s death, in Camelot, the king’s goodwill all that kept him alive, accusations of ill magic attached to his name.

But there’s more to it than that, Tarvek thinks. Magic is easy to understand, when held up to the spark. Wish a thing, pay the price, see it done. The hubris is even the same; every spark thinks themselves to be powerful akin to god, the possessor of some beyond-divine truth. There’s a reason that so many of them die to their own creations, or hacked apart in fields by frightened populations.

 _‘Free,’_ is not quite a thing that Tarvek can believe in. He has seen the shadow of it in the concept of love. But even that has its prices; Arthur loved his kingdom more than his wife, and Lancelot the queen more than the land. Guinevere loved them both too much to choose, and the court fell apart around the three of them, in blood and fire, the end of days. That’s what loving someone is, at the bottom of it. Magic, science; whatever name you choose. It’s all something from nothing, until there’s nothing left to give.

* * *

When the ship glides to a stop, tethered to the ground and halting, Tarvek stands, pulling his hat lower over his eyes, toolbelt clinking as he moves. A door opens at the far end of the cargo hold, and the dawn light filters in, thin and orange with the chill.

“Hey,” Tarvek asks Summerfield. “Could you do me a favor, when you go back to the castle?”

“Depends on the favor,” Summerfield says. 

“Nothing big,” Tarvek promises. “Just— can you tell Corporal Harrison that I’m sorry?”

“Sorry for what?” Summerfield asks, a note of concern slipping into her voice. “Are you okay? You’re not looking too hot. Is it about the transfer offer?”

“Tell her I’m sorry about her steel shipment,” Tarvek says. “She doesn’t have to do her paperwork, if she doesn’t want to.”

“That’s all you’re worried about?” Summerfield prods him, finger poking him in his left shoulder, making the nerve endings fire erratically, sensation blurring.

“Oh, no,” Tarvek assures her, walking down the ramp, Gil’s boots crunching over the snow. “I’m worried about a lot of things.”

“You’re a weird guy, BB,” Summerfield says. “Even for a spark.”

“I know,” Tarvek agrees, watching as she hefts a pair of crates onto her shoulders. “Safe travels, Shoshannah.”

From the ground outside Agatha’s home, Castle Wulfenbach looks smaller than it had the last time Tarvek saw it from this angle, even as it looms omnipresent in the sky above the valley. A field of stars dims to the west behind it, the diminished fleet drifting in the states between dawn and day, smaller airships beginning to meander once again from blimp to blimp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter are as follows: Blood & Gore - Tarvek gets shot and there's a bit on the nature of the wound; Child Abuse - Lucrezia, again, in passing. Also, Tarvek's family, once again in passing.
> 
> Congrats to everyone who saw this coming since chapter 1. I feel like that was probably most of you, so you're all winners.
> 
> I put a soundtrack together, in between this chapter and the last. The link is now in the opening notes of the fic.


	6. Ysbaddaden’s Beard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sixth task.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes it's been awhile since I updated this. In my defense, things happened. Namely we got back a certain weasel and the Paris arc kicked off so hard it jossed everything. Except, bizarrely, the concept that Tarvek could be unsure as to what happened to Gil. Which gave me the motivation I needed to finish the chapter, despite being wrong about everything else. Thanks for being patient with me, guys. In return, have the longest chapter so far.
> 
> See the end notes for full content warnings.

The statues of Agatha are bigger on the ground than they’d seemed in the air. A tidy trick of perception, considering that from Tarvek’s previous aerial vantage they’d already looked enormous. Now, the idols tower into the heavens, higher again than the town walls themselves, demarcating the boundary between the current and the past, an imperial testament to Gil’s strength, and his loss.

Honestly, if someone were to ask Tarvek, he’d say it’s all a bit gaudy. Agatha’s going to kill Gil when she sees these. And Tarvek would know; the only reason Agatha didn’t murder _him_ for projecting a similar-looking image over Sturmhalten two weeks ago was because someone else had recently shot him in the leg, and that had specifically been done to stop Agatha from actually killing him in a fit of embarrassed rage.

Besides that, Agatha had _specifically said_ no to the idea of statues in her likeness when the Castle had suggested them, when she’d come back to the walls of Mechanicsburg.

 _‘I saw Gil,’_ Agatha said next, hands still rain-wet on Tarvek’s arms.

It was summer, the last time he entered these gates. He’d been in a _massive_ amount of pain and terrified out of his mind, so at least that was the same. Hazily, he still remembers Gil pulling him free; Tarvek left these gates under his own power, he thinks. He remembers walking, step after step in the snow. He remembers Gil’s hands, his voice, the city, the pain, the hedge of thorns— he doesn’t remember being afraid. He’d been bleeding, but he hadn’t been afraid.

Now as then, the thorn hedge stretches out behind the statues, curving out from the pink-purple dome that’s swallowed up most of the town save the west. The branches menace, looming; as Tarvek approaches the compound gates at the west entrance, he can faintly see them growing, slinking forward by centimeters. The lesson of his childhood, of his mother’s mother’s childhood: Mechanicsburg is never beaten. It only ever sleeps.

In the orange dawn, Tarvek shivers. He should’ve brought a heavier coat than the leather jacket he borrowed from one of the captains he’d bribed earlier, but he’d figured that he wouldn’t be outside long. His mistake; one of many. Save for the fleet overhead, the skies are still clear, but Tarvek’s lived most of his life in the shadow of these mountains. He knows in his bones that more snow will be coming soon, and the world will only grow colder.

The entrance to the compound is well guarded. Just while on the approach, Tarvek spots several visible patrols, at least seven sniper outposts, and enough civil infrastructure to keep a complex the size of the Mechanicsburg itself afloat. What Gil’s done here is no small feat, and tacky icons or not, it remains somewhat impressive.

The western side of Mechanicsburg is where most of the compound stretches out. A small gate before the main gate, presumably leading underground. Barbed wire, turrets, and a well-traveled snow path lead up to the entrance, with only two people visibly stationed at the guardhouse, the little building presumably snug against the cold.

Tarvek affixes the iron pins to his suspenders, tugging his thin coat closed afterwards. Sturmhalten on the left, Mechanicsburg on the right, just the same as they’d be on a map, home sitting over his damaged heart.

Taking a breath, Tarvek shoves his spark back under his skin; something that takes more of an effort than it usually does, so close is it to the surface. He pulls his insignia cap down low, just over his eyes, and walks forward like he’s meant to be here; purposeful, unconcerned, making sure not to rush. Eyes slide off him and Tarvek can feel them go, every person he passes in the early morning landscape barely spares him a glance. The uniform does a lot, and the posture does the rest. Most people, smoke knights learn, don’t actually _want_ to be suspicious. Hardly anyone ever suspects the rank and file, the help. If you look like you belong somewhere, then why would anyone think that you _don’t?_

“I’m here to see Dr. Richards,” Tarvek says, slouching a little as he approaches the little shack that marks the entrance into the tunnels.

The first guard, insignia marking her as enlisted infantry, doesn’t even look up at him, focused on what looks to be the opening moves of a three deck game of klondike. “You got an appointment?” She asks, placing a two of hearts into the foundation.

“I’ve got a _delivery_ ,” Tarvek says, checking his watch with an air of impatience. “Didn’t Logistics wire ahead? They said they were gonna take care of this for me on account of it being so damn early—”

“Calm down,” the second guard tells him, a yawn exposing gold-capped canines. “Richards only just got in, anyway. Whatever it is you’ve gotta get to to her, it can keep.”

“You’re not the one who’s been carrying it around all night,” Tarvek grumbles, shoving his numb hands into the pockets of his pants.

“You don’t look like you’ve got anything that heavy,” the first guard says idly, turning three new cards. Her uniform is frayed, worn, but thickly padded. She’s not a large woman, and the uniform coat dwarfs her, her thin wrists and black, ungloved hands almost childlike in comparison.

“It’s not that it’s heavy so much as it’s _weird_ ,” Tarvek tells her. “They didn’t even let me _look_ in the package, just said I had to get it down ASAP, and didn’t tell me how to do it, either.”

“Spooky,” the infantrywoman comments, the ace of spades moving to its foundation. “But that’s how it is around here.”

Tarvek snorts. “Yeah, I’m starting to get that.”

“Think it’s anything dangerous?” The second guard asks him. Tarvek watches as gloved hands flip through a list of handwritten messages, unspooling rolls of telegraph paper.

“If it was,” Tarvek says, “they wouldn’t send it with _me_. At least,” he adds, after a pause, “I don’t think they would? I’m only third class.”

“I dunno,” the infantrywoman says, stacking a two of clubs over a three of diamonds, “we’re unranked and they gave us _guns_.”

“You Bedwyr James Bedrydant?” The second guard asks him, cutting off that disquieting thought without even looking up.

“Yes.”

“You got a confirmation number?”

“Five-three-two-zero-one-three,” he rattles off. “One-two-two-two-zero-one-five. Three-seven-two-zero-one-six. One-zero-three-nine.”

The code is easy enough to remember; Tarvek was originally the one who sent it, based on the encryption of the codes he saw Corporal Suchý send from the sixth luxograph office. The hailing beacon Tarvek strung together out of Cumali’s office has already proved invaluable, and hopefully it’ll get him through this time as well. 

“Looks like you’re solid,” the second guard tells him. “She’s down in the east tunnels; go as far as you can down the main path, and she’ll be off the big thoroughfare to the right.”

* * *

Tarvek doesn’t know how to save people. He can count the number of times he’s managed to pull it off on one hand, and every instance has been since meeting Agatha. Tarvek doesn’t know how to save people, doesn’t have the instinct for it, or the training. He knows how to stay alive. He knows, a little, under that, how to bring other people with him. But saving people, that’s Gil’s trick. Getting free, that’s Agatha’s.

But the paths that they’ve chosen are going to get the two of them killed. Agatha likes to pretend that she’s selfish, but she’s not; not in the real, dangerous way. Agatha’s selfish in that everything belongs to her, once she decides it does. Tarvek doesn’t know if Agatha would kill for what she loves. He’s certain she would die for it. Gil is even less self-possessed (and oh, god, what a farce _that_ whole concept is) than Agatha. Tarvek doesn’t think Gil ever puts it in those words to himself, that he’d die for his people. But he’s killing himself all the same.

Gil and Agatha don’t know how to be selfish, not really. That’s fine. It terrifies Tarvek, but it’s _fine_ , because being selfish is what _he_ is for. Agatha did her part and got Gil _free_ , but Tarvek doesn’t know how to save people; Agatha picked the wrong tool for the job. Someone has to save Gil, but all Tarvek knows how to do is not die.

* * *

It’s not any warmer inside than it was outside. Another consequence of not having a plan. Of course it wouldn’t be any warmer in the tunnels. The summer is only in the city, and these hallways of carved air exist both beneath and inside it, free cold winding through the frozen heat.

In all respects, Mechanicsburg is the same as it was two days ago. The memories that Tarvek has of being pulled free, smeared as they may be on the interior of his skull, are still accurate as to the landscape of the city under siege. Everything is still red. Everyone is still dying. Missiles and mortar stones still arc through the air, suspended with the blood, the solid fire.

 _‘Don’t touch the walls,’_ says the sign in the entrance of what in better times was the western gate. _‘Follow proper evacuation procedure.’_

Shifts change, at dawn. Right now it’s quiet in the tunnels, and Tarvek feels as if he were in some vast cavern deep underground, knowing all the while that he has not left the city streets. Knowing that if he looks overhead, there is still full sunlight, the same as it was when he first must’ve closed his eyes.

Is this what Camelot looked like, as it fell? Sunlit, crumbling, a preserved tragedy happening over and over again? Stories say that Mordred never took the city, not forever, not for long. He left to fight his father, and brought all his knights with him when he went to die on the fields at Camlan. This is what Guinevere never went back to; this is what Sturmhalten looked like as it burned.

Bedwyr went home, after. Three times his king gave Bedwyr one command, and after, the knight was left to his own devices, without a purpose or a sword. Surely, he went back to Camelot. Surely, he needed to know who else, if anyone, had survived.

Mechanicsburg isn’t Tarvek’s home. It’s across the mountains from his home, but it isn’t where he belongs. He died here, though. On strange and foreign soil, born again with strange and familiar friends. There’s a part of him, surely, that belongs _to_ this place now. Tarvek’s survived twice in this city. 

_Third time_ , he thinks. _More chances than the genuine article ever got._

* * *

The problem of myths and swords is that, well, they’re not exactly neutral objects. A blade can be a symbol of the rule, or protection, or _loyalty_ , but at the end of the day, you use a sword to kill people.

Legends give the tools other powers, makes them nice and comfortable. Blades that dispelled magic, blades that cut stone. A blade that only the king’s son could lift, a blade to weld Britannia together, found in a stone. And then, of course, Excalibur.

Excalibur was a blade of legend, to be sure. Avalon’s own Lady gave her son and her sword to Arthur, long after he’d begun to rebuild his kingdom, once he was no longer Camelot’s child monarch, and a ruler in his own right instead of by blood and by blessing. They say the edge sang with power from another world, that it never tarnished, never rusted. That when Arthur first tested it against his enemies, the sword in turn tested him, letting out a light so bright it would blind any but the righteous.

On each face of the sword, words were said to have appeared: _‘Take me up,’_ said one said, and the other read _‘cast me away.’_

In the beginning, Arthur made the obvious choice. At the end, it became Bedwyr’s turn to select between them.

* * *

The further Tarvek gets into the tunnels, the more people he begins to see, both the living and undead. By the time the siege got fully underway, most of the tourists had scrambled, fled the city limits as soon as there was any _hint_ of increased Empire activity near the town. News of Sturmhalten burning had swept through the valley, and with the Empire choking all reports of mass wasp infestations in Balan’s Gap and Sturmhalten, there had been no reason for them not to flee for the valley entrance or the mountains. What this meant was that by the time the time field fell, the only people left in Mechanicsburg were civilians and soldiers, with a very thin line between the two parties considering how well-armed the average Mechanicsburger was.

Once the retreat of Empire forces had been called in earnest, most of the fighting took place on or outside the city walls, thus exempting those combatants from the time stop’s aegis. But the deeper and deeper Tarvek goes into the red tunnels, the clearer it is that the siege hadn’t exactly _stopped._ Technicians in real time work in bleary motions, the Wulfenbach staff regrouping for a new set of shifts at the extraction machines, testing, prodding, excavating the living dead trapped inside the solid air of the tunnel walls.

Dr. Richards is one of three project heads leading the extraction efforts. Tarvek hasn’t met her yet; so far he’s only interacted with Dr. Rothfuss, the team’s medical doctor.

‘Interacted’ might be pushing it, a little; Tarvek mostly remembers someone yelling at Gil for unsafe practices and ill-timed extractions, and the phrase: “with all due respect, herr baron, I cannot allow this! We haven’t yet found a way to account for the chrono-spillage!”

Dr. Yazhu Richards, unlike Rothfuss, is a spark, and head of the extraction efforts from the time travel angle. From what Tarvek’s been able to figure out over the last day, she’s an art spark, technically, a specialist in non-euclidean architecture. Gil had recruited her to the effort because she wrote a paper on the potential for gravity to warp the fabric of space and time, which led her to hypothesis that a sufficiently bizarre piece of architecture could bend two points of time together, like folding the edges of a map. To be frank, Richards’ work is genius, largely unfounded, and has incredibly terrifying implications if her theories are true. Tarvek has no trouble seeing why Gil had decided it’d be safer to keep her in Imperial hands, and then put a restriction the materials she’s able to requisition without Baronial approval, not to mention a sign off from the logisticians.

Unfortunately for the Empire, that sort of thing tends to breed resentment, and leaves Dr. Richards a target for the careful manipulator. A vulnerability that Tarvek now understands was meant to _catch_ the careful manipulator. It’s probably wise, then, that Tarvek has given up, to some extent, on care.

“Dr. Richards?” He asks.

Almond eyes look up, framed by black hair and square glasses. “Well,” Richards remarks, “you’re certainly early. Unless I worked through Tuesday again. Or time has come undone.” She pauses, and, slowly, precisely, tilts her head 45 degrees to the left. “Would you check your watch, please? I’d really hate to lose track of that sort of thing. The superposition is just unlivable.”

Dr. Richards is at home in the sprawling laboratory that sits in the center of what used to be the square between Brass Street and Dire Flail Avenue. Diagrams hang haphazardly between metal rods, a tangled series of multicolored strings that resolve themselves into a worsening headache and what Tarvek realizes must be a _map_ , or as close as Richards could get without using her specialized geometries to show the fourth dimension she’s attempting to describe.

“I was told you wouldn’t get here until tomorrow,” she tells him, already up to her wrists in bits of wire and a model of what looks uncomfortably like the Red Cathedral. “It really is rude of you not to be on time.”

“I’m sorry to have exceeded your expectations,” Tarvek says. “If it helps balance anything, I don’t have whatever package Lieutenant Cumali promised you.”

“In what world does that balance anything?” Richards huffs. “First you put me out on money in the officers’ pool, and then you don’t even have what I sent for in the first place. I might be a spark, but I’m not that kind of batty. And you still haven’t told me whether or not I’ve broken the fundamental guidelines of reality, so if you could just check that, please.”

With numb hands, Tarvek checks his watch, the embossed trilobite on the cover shining as he clicks it open. “It’s about half past six,” he says quietly, watching the hands turn, the wheels of the cosmos turn rings in the calendar on the inside of the watch cover. “It’s Wednesday.”

“That’s good,” Richards remarks. “You’re still early. Did the lieutenant brief you on entry procedure for the Cathedral?”

“I was told not to touch the walls,” Tarvek says.

Cumali’s plan seems to have gone farther than Tarvek had assumed. Tarvek’s been playing this one by instinct since he left Gil; the furthest step he’d gotten ahead of himself was a vague idea of bursting into Richards’ space with the lieutenant’s gun out, and to go from there. But if she thinks that Cumali’s plan is still in action, then it means that he’s likely still out of commission, and Tarvek is more than happy to play along if it means he doesn’t have to threaten anyone else, or shoot somebody.

Richards shakes her head, wraps one of the wires in the Cathedral diagram around her hand. “More to it than that,” she says. She stretches the wire out on her hand, and bites through it quickly. It makes a sound like a violin string breaking, and recoils as she ties it off again, connecting a buttress to a spire. “You’ll need an entry suit, and someone to prep the entryway for you. The extraction machinery is delicate, but I’ve been told you’re not completely useless; whatever you’re supposed to be getting, I’m sure you can get yourself. The rig is still there from when the baron was impatient enough to get _you,_ after all.”

Tarvek’s heart aches, the skin on his chest pulled tight under the bandage. He is so cold, now, and he can still vaguely feel Gil’s hand on his arm, an elbow hooked under his knees. He’d been too weak to stand, too dead to think, but he remembers that, like a dream; everyone shouting at Gil, and Gil’s arms like a cage around his body, a shield against the sound.

“I’ll prep you,” Richards says, stepping away from her work station. “Help you on the way back, too, since there’s really only one way in and out. The Cathedral has been the worst part of it, so close to the epicenter. We’re moving a little farther in every day, but it’s been abominably slow going as we get towards it. Time is one of those stable forces,” she explains, wiping her hands on her labcoat as she steps from behind her work station. “It doesn’t take kindly to being pushed or prodded; it tries to retain its shape and consistency. Which is why it’s taken so much _doing_ to get things to bend enough that we could even get our feet in the door.”

“It’s remarkable,” Tarvek tells her. “You’ve done something amazing here.”

Dr. Richards snorts at the praise, and throws a beige lump at Tarvek’s head. “Of course I have,” she says. “I wouldn’t have moved my wife and our children out here for the prospect of lesser opportunity. This is going to make my _career._ When I’m done here, I’m going to be the undisputed _leader_ in my field. Not to mention having legitimized the ‘soft sciences.’ As if art is a science to begin with,” she adds. “Or if my being a woman is what makes it ‘soft’ if they decide it’s a science at all.”

Tarvek shakes the lump out. The texture is strange, too slick and too thin, as if someone had found a way to rubberize silk, or else made an elastic so thin that it no longer snapped back to some original shape. When he holds it up, it resolves itself into what he realizes is an incredibly ugly suit of some sort, ending at the wrists, neck, and ankles. Honestly, it’s beige. And there’s an enormous clock right on the chest, and some sort of draping below that, leading to the crotch. This might be the ugliest thing Tarvek’s seen in a long time, and Anevka had had some very specious taste in dresses, towards the end.

He looks back up at Richards. “I have to wear this?”

“Unless you want your insides not to be on your insides anymore,” Richards says. “The field reacts poorly to objects on foreign timelines; it tries to equalize the pressure. We haven’t excavated the Cathedral yet, so you go in there without you suit on, and you’ll be feeling all thirty-one of those months you missed with a few centuries in change. Just stick it on over your clothes; you’ll find gloves and a helmet in a crate under the map.”

Bending down to get at the crate turns out not to be the healthiest choice. Tarvek feels the bandages on his chest catch as he tries to lean forward, diffuse and murky pain making itself known. Now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure if he’d really want to try shoving an equipment crate with his injured arm, either. Frowning, he shifts around the table until he’s in a position to kick the damn thing, sliding the box out from under the table with the toe of Gil’s sturdy boots.

Somewhere behind him, Tarvek hears Dr. Richards moving; he counts her footsteps as he crouches down, keeping loose even as he fishes what he needs out of the equipment locker. He knows better than to assume that she’s no danger to him; the doctor is a spark in her lab— that makes her a danger to everybody on the continent, and Tarvek still has no reason to think that she won’t turn on him in particular. All he has is the thin veneer of hope, playing along in the offchance that she really does believe that he’s here on someone’s orders, either Gil’s, or the lieutenant’s.

“Opening the field is a two step process. We’re insulated here, but you’re going in past the tunnels, into a whole other timestream,” Richards explains. “The closer to the epicenter of the stop we get, the more severe the chronometric displacement is, and it all gets uniformly worse the longer we leave this alone and move farther out of sync with what’s inside the field.”

Tarvek tucks the pants of the shapeless beige diving suit into Gil’s boots. They don’t quite fit him; Gil has somewhat larger feet and calves than he does. Tarvek’s lucky for the size difference; if there weren’t extra room in the boot Tarvek would have to strip down to his underwear beneath the suit in order to get everything properly sealed.

“The Cathedral’s the worst part of it,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s where just about all the high value targets actually are. It’s also the farthest in, which means we’ve had a _hell_ of a time moving forward.”

Turning, Tarvek watches as Richards grabs a pair of goggles from a work table. She fits them over her eyes with practice only to shove them up onto her forehead, which, really, is just abominable lab safety. Richards moves over to the tunnel wall, solid red air bound behind perilous architecture. There’s an aperture under the support beam, a bronze-gold door surrounded by machinery.

“The suit’s going to lock you to this time,” Richards says, tone clipped. “Basically, you’re going to carry your signature with you.”

“You don’t need to talk to me like I’m a layperson,” Tarvek tells her, his own spark reaching out, curious, anxious, affronted at the slight, still trying to _solve._ Instead of acting on it, Tarvek slides on a pair of thick rubber gloves, sliding them into the open sleeves of the diving suit.

“Son, everyone’s a layperson compared to me,” Richards answers, jabbing at a panel with a look of absent concentration. “People tend not to _like_ architecture unless Euclid signed off on it. Now get your helmet on, then press the button on your neck to automatically seal the suit. I’m serious about decompression risks; if you let yourself get disintegrated now, it’ll waste _years_ of work, and the baron might just kill me.”

Carefully, Tarvek takes his stolen messenger cap off, shaking his ponytail out from under it as he places it on a table. He pulls the helmet on over his head carefully, the sensation in his hands further dulled by the thick gloves of the diving suit. “Then let’s hope everything goes fine,” he says, and the glass cylinder reflects the words back at him.

* * *

Violetta had been waiting for him, when Tarvek was sent home. Once he was done breaking through, once he was clean and presentable and his shattered edges had started to fold back up inside him, Tarvek had been pulled aside by his grandmother, and introduced to his little cousin.

They had met before, of course. Their family was large, but everyone knew each other anyway; it was rude not to, and also incredibly dangerous. That wasn’t even the first time that the two of them had been formally introduced; Tarvek had gone to Violetta’s christening, even if he only vaguely remembered holding his mother’s hand as she explained to him that the little squalling thing in the bassinet would belong to him, someday.

But that day they had been introduced, not as family, but as a swearing of loyalty. Grandmother had stepped outside, because this moment was supposed to be _private_ , the solemn little girl and the boy who would be king. Violetta’s contract was Tarvek’s birthright, and hers was service.

When Tarvek was ten, and Violetta had just turned seven, she started to slip _nepenthes_ extract into his drinks, spraying the collars of his shirts with the poison before he could wear them. She’d known, of course, that her cousin was sad, but Tarvek had not been improving— Violetta was charged with keeping Tarvek safe, but she didn’t know how to fight the foes that lived inside him. So Violetta did the best she could, rotating the size and timing of the doses so as not to create any sort of dependence.

Violetta was _good_ , and always has been— it took Tarvek months to notice the difference, the fluctuation in his moods, the fact that some days could be good. But there was something thin to the quality of it, like a shadow projected through a screen. Even as a child, Tarvek was paranoid, and knew his chemistry well enough to go looking through the Blue Codex of toxins when he felt his guard dropping.

Making Violetta stop was the first malicious thing Tarvek ever did to her. Even at the age of ten he knew that care and skill like that was going to get them both killed. The names Tarvek called Violetta were vicious, and worse to be delivered to a child. He attacked her skill, her dedication; how stupid _was_ she, to be caught? How careless and imprecise, that he learned to smell the toxin on his clothes?

It wasn’t the first cruel thing Tarvek ever did to her. When you’re told you own someone, cruelty is unthinking and slow, like breathing. But that was the first time Tarvek meant it to hurt, where he made her cry to prove a point. And after that— cruelty because it was easy, because it was safe. He’d rather that Violetta was alive, and that she hated him, than for her to care and the both of them be dead.

The conventional wisdom was that Violetta was born to protect him, because that’s what one’s lesser peers were _for_. Tarvek’s birthright was a kingdom, and Violetta was the first of all the people he’d be given with it, someone never even given the _chance_ to swear. Someone Tarvek had never even thought that _he_ should have to swear to in return until it wouldn’t mean anything, anymore, until the best he could do is try and send her somewhere _safe_ , give her into the hands of someone who would protect her and would _care_.

Violetta’s birthright was murder. She was sold into Tarvek’s service before she could talk, and all his little cousin wanted was to make him happy. She hates him, now, and Tarvek honestly believes that that has to be safer for the both of them. When you love someone, they can destroy you. But if you hate, if you’re wary—

Every knight must die. But not today.

* * *

Mechanicsburg opens around him like an iris, time dilating as the airlock moves him from one timestream to another. It reminds Tarvek of visiting England; the feeling of descent by diving bell, two worlds separated by the thinnest of barriers. On one side he sees Dr. Richards become a blur, her actions speeding into incomprehensibility as Tarvek leaves Gil’s territory, coming even with the petrified carnage of Agatha’s city.

Everything is as he left it; still and burning. Flagstones are cracked beneath his feet, Dire Flail Avenue letting out into Belphegor’s Way. The only difference now is the lack of the distinct pink tinge that characterizes the ‘walls’ of the tunnel from Gil’s side of the compound. Looking out, the compound is blue and smeared, impossible to comprehend. In the distance, the Cathedral; red, imposing, framed by the strange light of a sun that set years ago.

A pressure tightens in his chest and inner ears as the aperture closes, denser and smaller and _painful,_ until finally it bottoms out with a pop that leaves Tarvek cold, empty. He can’t hear Gil _or_ Agatha, anymore. He can’t feel them.

He doesn’t know how to describe the way that leaves him. He used to be good at being alone. He’d learned to handle it. He understands physical pain; he’s intimately familiar with it, covered in scars. Emotional pain, he knows too, though he’s less apt to admit it. The only thing inside Tarvek’s chest now is his own heart, weak and damaged. There’s too much space. This is— a return to what he once was shouldn’t _hurt_ like this.

Slowly, Tarvek starts to walk.

* * *

It took Arthur a long time to die. That remains the other property of the sword, you see: an edge doesn’t always cut so cleanly.

The scabbard of Excalibur was nearly as magical as the blade itself. Moreso, arguably, considering the few and dubious effects that fable attributes to the fairy sword. But the scabbard always has the same power in every story that gave it power: whosoever held the sheath would not die of lack of blood. A specific and remarkable gift; if Arthur hadn’t been a warrior under all his gold, that enchantment would’ve been useless. Instead, it allowed his story to fully unravel, for him to sit, bleeding in the mud and the sand, dead but not dying while he waited for Bedwyr to give the sword back to the lake.

Bedwyr understood magic. Understood the spark. Had a little of both, humming in his blood. As someone who made swords and trained soldiers, Bedwyr could recognize the value of a tool, and Excalibur was as good a tool as a blade could come.

The first time his king told Bedwyr to cast the sword away, Bedwyr took it up, and lied. It’s what he did the second time, too.

‘I put the sword in the water,’ the knight told his king. ‘I put the sword in the water.’

‘What did you see?’ Arthur asked him. ‘What did you see?’

‘I saw a ripple,’ Bedwyr told him. ‘I saw a star.’

‘If you’re going to lie to me,’ Arthur must’ve told him, ‘you might as well make it a lie worth telling.’

* * *

“Are you going to pretend to be from Paris, too?” A familiar voice asks, the sound of grinding cobblestones and metal.

“Well,” Tarvek says, “the name I’ve been using lately is Welsh.”

“Interesting,” Castle Heterodyne remarks. “Though certainly more boring than the other one, if you won’t even _try_ to be facetious. I would’ve expected otherwise from the both of you, to be honest.”

“I’d like to think I’m smarter than that, thanks. Have you been awake in here the whole time?” Tarvek asks as he winds towards the Cathedral.

“Hmm,” the Castle dithers, the hum like a rusted gate closing. “Define ‘awake.’ Mostly, I drift. The masters built me to always know; I think faster than you weak fleshy things.”

“Do you think, when you have no one to talk to?” Tarvek clarifies.

“Do _you?”_ The Castle retorts. “And it’s not as if I’ve been alone. I _am_ still populated; I wonder if you remember, young man, half the the things I’ve said to _you_ in these years.”

Despite himself, Tarvek shudders, a chill racing down his spine that’s hard to pin entirely on sleep deprivation or the trouble with his heart.

“Oooh, that looks like a yes,” the Castle says, the sound of that squeaky-wheel glee just as unsettling as ever.

“How can you even see me, like this?” Tarvek asks. “I’d assume that with the majority of your instrumentation on the inside of the field, you’d hardly be able to track me.”

“That other young man has been so helpful,” the Castle informs him. “Turning my lenses around so I can see all you little people scuttle around like the vermin that you are.”

“If that much has been working, I don’t doubt that your defenses are online, as well,” Tarvek says. “Once Agatha comes home, we’re all going to be in for a surprise, I’d bet.” Of more than one type, too; the Castle is a static object in a lost world; Tarvek is an isolated variable from a separate time stream, an intruder. The Castle shouldn’t be able to perceive him at all, let alone speak to him. For it to be able to manage, it must’ve found a way to artificially speed its own thought processes; if it retains the trick once Mechanicsburg is free, a _surprise_ is going to be the least of their worries.

The Castle laughs, stone over stone. “I _knew_ there was a reason I liked you. So much like that first fool, or the rest of your family, only you’re so much _smarter,_ aren’t you? You don’t even bother to hide what you _really_ are.”

“The rest of them want power or glory,” Tarvek says blandly. “I just want to live.”

“Oh?” The Castle asks. “You’ve certainly thrown yourself into danger enough times on my lady’s behalf. And that other young man’s, as well, if my memory hasn’t become corrupted again.”

“That’s different,” Tarvek tells the Castle.

“How so?”

“Everyone dies,” Tarvek explains. “But Agatha— she deserves as long as I can give her,” he says. “I’m sure _you_ understand.”

“Hrm,” the Castle says. “Well. Then a piece of advice, little prince: don’t look up when you get to the Cathedral. I rather doubt that you’d like what you’ll see.”

Rounding the corner of Hangman’s Square, Tarvek looks up. Almost immediately, he regrets it.

“Perhaps not all that much smarter than your ancestors, then,” the Castle remarks. “I did tell you not to look; you humans tend to get so squeamish about dimensional biology if that Euclid upstart didn’t give it his blessing.”

* * *

No one ever tells the story like this, but it’s true: Lancelot was the one who tore Camelot down. The kingdom was dying anyway, but he could’ve saved it. The Knight of the Lake was Arthur’s strongest, and his lover besides. Lancelot’s presence at Camlan could’ve turned the tide; his leaving Gareth, Gaheris, and Agravaine alive instead of cutting the brothers down certainly would’ve.

So, yes— in the end, at the ruin of things, Lancelot could’ve saved Camelot, at least for another day, at least for another hour.

All he would’ve had to do was let a woman die.

* * *

The Red Cathedral holds more of Tarvek’s history than being just another place where he’s died. Generations ago, it was built at the prodding of one of Tarvek’s non-Valois ancestors, a prince from his father’s line. Prince Vadim, the story goes, who like the Good Heterodyne came to power in the days just after Euphrosynia and the King, apparently bet his neighbor that no _proper_ cathedral could stand, let alone be _built_ in Mechanicsburg, so pagan were its people. Now, hundreds of years later, the Red Cathedral still stands, drenched in a history of very pointed blood sacrifices conducted on the high holy days. Needless to say, Vadim ate his hat; the men of Tarvek’s father’s line had always been needlessly stubborn about honoring their word.

From the entrance, Tarvek can faintly see the bright light of whatever the Baron did, the flare still blinding even through the gelatinous distance between the eastern balcony he stands on and the southern courtyard. Overhead—

The inside of the Cathedral, unlike its venerable facade, is not in quite so good condition. Pews are smashed, and every soul within scrambles towards a single point: an obelisk that glows on the wall so brightly Tarvek can’t quite look right at it.

Moloch, in particular, looks distressed, _angry_ under the fear that sits on him plain as day. The man might claim not to be Agatha’s chief minion, but here he is, perfectly captured in a moment that says _do not go where I cannot follow, you titantic moron,_ a common refrain from those that try to keep their masters from cliff diving without a parachute.

Ruxala and Vanamonde are staring at the place where Tarvek used to be, both differing degrees of concerned. Ruxala is absolutely covered in weasels, and a few more hang suspended in the air. Tarvek can almost see his own outline where gravity has yet to take them, blind kits and leggy adolescents.

The extraction rig that Gil must’ve piloted stands out next to them. Tarvek already knows he won’t take any of the humans with him. He doesn’t know what it is he’ll be going back to; the problem with using one of Gil’s plans is that Gil’s plans only ever go one step at a time. Tarvek won’t put anyone else in danger if he has no reason to past thinking that they’d want to go free. Not when the baron might demand loyalty from Ruxala, not when he’s sure Ruxala would go to her grave or exile refusing.

Gil and his father both tend to think the same about loyalty; you’re either with them, or you’re not. There’s no room for nuance in that worldview, no allowance for ‘with you now but might not be _later,’_ or ‘would be with you but _can’t yet,’_ the myriad other distinctions that determine alliance. But the Baron and the baron both act like the right to rule comes from the capability to do so, that power demands loyalty. That ability is its own answer to whether or not someone _should_ rule; they might dress it up in finer colors, but at the end of the day, they’re a new coat of paint on an old breed of despot, might making right.

Of course, there’s another school of thought; old and antiquated, but as a child, Tarvek had loved it for its simplicity. For its relative ease, but retention of burden: _right makes might,_ the stories said. _He who lifts the sword from the stone, he who holds Avalon’s blade—_ it’d all been remarkably romantic when he was eight.

Personally, Tarvek is of the opinion that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. If the people don’t want a king, if they don’t _need_ him, they’ll revolt, and Mordred proved that well enough in the end. Cumali was right about why the Other relied on her wasps; why should Lucrezia have to bother producing some sort of value for her subjects, or try tending to their fickle whims, when she could just _tell them_ to bow down, and _make_ them listen?

Bedwyr only understood the edges of that truth, the shadow of it. He thought it was power that made the king, which fair enough; power has almost everything to do with it. But there’s a lot more to power than swinging a sword, no matter _how_ impressive the blade is. Power has less to do with holding a sword than it has to do with making a sword. Or being one.

But at the end of an era, Bedwyr looked at Excalibur, and saw two things: he saw his friend’s brother, his _king_ , the child monarch grown into a man, dying on the ground. And he saw the sword that made Arthur king of the Isles and not just Camelot, the scabbard that kept the life inside his body even as the blood flowed out.

And the maimed knight, cursed with failure and burdened with protection, must’ve thought: _‘maybe this one, I can save.’_

Tarvek pulls the switch, and in a localized field time begins to slip sideways, parallel lines made to cross.

* * *

Agatha was the first person to ever come back for him because she wanted to. Tarvek’s been rescued before, but always by people who _had to,_ because that was the safest way he’d made the world work.

But Agatha chose him. She had nothing to gain by saving him in Mechanicsburg. Not when he’d betrayed her, not when he had _nothing._ And she’d still looked at the death on him and said _no, mine,_ staked the claim so deeply that not feeling it now is killing him all over again.

Tarvek had not loved her in Sturmhalten. He couldn’t have. But he loved her here. He loves her now. And safe or not, he knows he’s going to love Agatha for the rest of his life.

* * *

The weasels and the kits are waiting for Tarvek inside the aperture. The extraction rig pulled time and space asunder to rescue them, and they wake slowly in this in-between place, coming back to life.

In total, there are four adults and seven kits. The kits are a mixture of colors, squeaking and squirming as Tarvek bundles them into his arms. Two of the adults are orange, one is blue-gray, and one is brown; there had been a fifth, also bright orange, but Tarvek remembers it on Agatha’s shoulder, so Tarvek figures that it must’ve gone with her through the obelisk. Which is good— Lucrezia’s had a two and a half year headstart on them; Agatha’s going to need whatever advantage she can get.

Tarvek presses the control that will equalize the aperture, trying to hold still as the adults clamber up his shoulders and inspect him, claws clicking on the glass cylinder of his helmet. The gray one perches directly atop his head, and peers down at his face through the glass, chittering. They’re utterly ridiculous creatures, but thankfully not heavy. Tarvek finds himself inexplicably fond, and chagrined at his own fondness. These little marvels are going to win them the war, provided they can all survive that long.

As he waits in the aperture, that empty feeling in his chest starts to swell and fade, like a carcass expanding with spores. The sense of Agatha curls up in him, greedy, undeterred by its own thinness. She’s angry at someone, and it’s probably him; if she’s half as aware of Tarvek and Gil as Tarvek is of her, he imagines the last few days have been something of a wild ride. He’s likely going to have to apologize, a bizarrely giddy prospect.

Around him, Mechanicsburg tints further and further red as Tarvek leaves its timeline, and the blurred world on the other side of the aperture becomes less and less blue, broad strokes beginning to resolve. He seems to have accumulated something of an audience; figures compile themselves out of irrational smears. The short one is probably Dr. Richards; the upswung shock of hair is likely Rothfuss, given what Tarvek remembers of him. A few others mill about at impossible speeds, but one more is unmistakable; the baron is waiting for him by the control panel, perfectly still, outlined in blue.

* * *

Tarvek remembers dying. He’d wondered (Agatha smiling at him, Tarvek strung out of his own body, soul somewhere between her body and Gil’s) if he was going to feel it, when his heart stopped beating entirely, without their help.

Tarvek could feel them both so clearly. His thoughts were their thoughts were his thoughts, and even though Tarvek doesn’t remember the specifics anymore, he knows he’d been something more than whole. He still doesn’t believe in miracles, but—

(Tarvek doesn’t quite remember his own happiness. It’s a far-off, mythic thing, to him, artificial in a way that language never has been, a destiny for other people the same as the tales of kings must be for common men, an endless dream to aspire to. Tarvek has snatches of it: Gil’s gap-toothed smile; Paris, gleaming and in its own way, free; the way his heart expanded to kiss Agatha, the slime-covered imperfection of it; the promise of a world after the war. But most people, he thinks, cannot count their good times on their hands.)

—He’d thought, in the moments before the lightning struck, that it would have been worth it, to have had this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter are as follows: Child/Familial Abuse - Tarvek's an asshole to Violetta; Non-Con Drug Use - Violetta repeatedly doses Tarvek with _nepenthes_ extract without telling him in an attempt to combat his depression.
> 
> When I started writing this fic, I told myself I could only have _one_ reference to or quotation from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, otherwise there'd be six in every chapter. Now, nine months later, I finally get to use the bit I've been sitting on since I started. That particular section was one of the very first I wrote for this whole monstrosity, and I've been cackling over it from the start.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [On the Subject of Falling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6235180) by [NevillesGran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran)




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